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A piece of garbage sent from the International Space Station successfully escaped orbit again last month and pierced the roof of a house in Florida, according to NASA.
When the federal agency disposed of a slab of spaceborne debris weighing about 5,800 pounds (2,630 kilograms), it was expected to disintegrate as it fell into Earth’s atmosphere on March 8.
But a small piece of the payload — about the size of a smartphone — survived and crashed into a house in Naples, Florida, last month, NASA confirmed in an April 15 news release.
“It was a great sound. He almost hit my son,” said Alejandro Otero, who identified himself as the homeowner, to CNN affiliate WINK News in March, days after the incident. “He was two rooms over and heard it .”
The impact event challenged NASA’s expectations of what can and cannot survive the re-entry process, according to the space agency — and could have broader implications for future space debris disposal efforts.
A close call and an unusual discovery
Otero said he identified the object as a possible piece of space debris that tore through his roof, he said.
“Something ripped through the house and then made a big hole in the floor and the ceiling,” explained Otero, who said he was not home at the time of the incident. “I’m very grateful that no one was hurt.”
After analyzing the piece of debris at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA confirmed that it was a piece of space station cargo left behind, according to a statement released by the agency on Monday.
“The International Space Station will conduct a detailed investigation of the jet and re-entry analysis to determine the cause of the surviving debris and to update modeling and analysis, as necessary,” NASA said in the statement.
The federal agency did not immediately respond to additional questions about the investigation or whether the agency has changed any plans for future space station debris disposal.
Garbage disposal in space
NASA regularly brings home batches of science experiments, cargo and garbage from the space station using capsules such as the SpaceX-built Dragon spacecraft.
But after new batteries were installed on the space station in 2021, authorities disposed of pallets of aging nickel-hydrogen batteries in a different way.
A robotic arm removed the garbage, weighing as much as an SUV, from the outside of the space station and turned it into Earth’s orbit, according to NASA. The federal agency’s plan hinged on the belief that the discarded batteries, which were traveling more than 22 times faster than the speed of sound, would eventually burn up as they hit the atmosphere.
The garbage “will orbit the Earth for two to four years before burning up harmlessly,” NASA said when the pallet was placed on March 11, 2021.
The European Space Agency, which regularly tracks objects in space centered on Earth, said in a statement on March 8, “While some parts may reach the ground, the casualty risk – the likelihood of someone being hit – is very high low.
“Large uncertainties, driven primarily by changing levels of atmospheric drag, prevent more accurate predictions at this time,” according to the ESA, which is one of NASA’s partners in the orbiting laboratory.
Not the first uncontrolled reentry
To be clear, there are thousands of pieces of uncontrolled junk in space, including spent rocket parts, abnormal satellites, and debris from satellite collisions and weapons tests.
The vast majority of the detritus is completely burned on its way to Earth.
However, other massive objects have previously returned uncontrollably from space, including a 22-tonne rocket body built in China that was jettisoned into the Pacific Ocean in 2022. It is likely that pieces of the rocket survived, sinking water to the bottom of the sea. Members of the international aerospace community, including NASA, criticized the China National Space Administration for the move.
But the debris that hit Otero’s house was the result of a miscalculation about how space junk behaves.
NASA already has strong policies in place to prevent objects from colliding in space — or affecting populated areas on Earth, said John Crasidis, a space debris expert and Moog Professor of Innovation at the University at Buffalo’s School of Engineering and Applied Science .
But, in this case, the federal agency’s assumption that the debris it tossed aside in 2021 would not pose a threat to humans on earth when it headed back toward Earth in March was a serious mistake. The space agency should be more conservative in its analysis if it tries a similar debris disposal method in the future, he said.
“I think this was a good wake-up call to say, ‘Hey we have to do better’ — and the United States should never be in a situation where something like this came down and went through a house in Florida,” Crassidis. said.
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