Emergencies
NASA: ISS debris hits house in Florida
A recovered piece of space junk that came from the International Space Station. photo
© NASA/dpa
A few weeks ago, a discarded battery pack from the ISS space station burned up over Central America – but not completely. It has now been confirmed that one part even hit a house.
The impending crash caused quite a stir in March, but now it’s clear: part of a discarded battery pack from the space station ISS hit a building in the USA. A house in Naples, Florida, was affected, NASA said. The US space agency thus confirmed the suspicions of the homeowner, who had reported the impact in his home in March.
The battery pack largely burned up over Central America at the beginning of March, and small pieces of debris fell into the sea in a corridor between Guatemala and Florida. The pallet had previously flown over Germany at an altitude of 139 kilometers, as the Bundeswehr Space Situation Center announced.
The man in Naples had contacted an astronomer on the online platform X (formerly Twitter) who had posted about the ISS debris entering the atmosphere. Apparently one of the parts ended up in his house, wrote Alejandro Otero on X. He also posted pictures of a piece of metal – and of holes in the roof and ceiling. “Break through my roof and go through 2 floors. Almost hit my son,” he wrote, asking the scientist to contact NASA.
According to NASA, the space experts collected the piece and subjected it to analysis at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The origin was confirmed there. It is a part weighing around 725 grams and measuring around 10 centimeters in size made of the metal alloy Inconel.
Space debris is constantly entering the atmosphere
The battery pack was decoupled from the ISS in March 2021. The platform, which is about the size of a car and weighs around 2.6 tons, would later burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere – a common type of disposal in space travel. According to the European Space Agency (ESA), space debris entering the atmosphere happens all the time, as does individual fragments reaching the ground. No serious damage or injuries have been reported so far.
NASA will begin an investigation into how the piece of metal was able to survive entering the atmosphere, Monday’s blog post said. The US authority is committed to responsible use in Earth orbit. Their goal is to keep the risk to people on Earth as low as possible when taking necessary measures such as dropping objects from space.