The discarded battery pack from the ISS space station flew over Germany. At 7:21 p.m., the package flew from the west at an altitude of 139 kilometers over the center of Germany, said the Bundeswehr’s space situation center in Uedem, Lower Rhine. It later crashed over the Atlantic. This was announced by the spokeswoman for the Bundeswehr Space Situation Center, Simone Meyer. She couldn’t initially say where the package landed. It was “probably largely burnt up”.
According to the German Aerospace Center (DLR), the object was a platform with battery packs. It was deliberately separated from the International Space Station ISS on March 21, 2021, only to enter the atmosphere years later. According to experts, it was about the size of a car and weighed 2.6 tons.
Such objects usually burn up when they enter the atmosphere. However, experts were not sure whether parts of the battery could end up on the surface of the earth – possibly even in inhabited areas, although this was previously classified as extremely unlikely. It is not unusual for space debris to fly towards Earth: “An object of this size enters the Earth’s atmosphere every week,” says space debris expert Benjamin Bastida Virgili.