An unidentified object landed directly on an American’s house on March 8. An event extraordinary enough for NASA to take an interest in it. Thus, the agency announced that it had recovered the projectile which could potentially come from the release of waste from the International Space Station (ISS). The object is to be analyzed at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
A pallet of old batteries
He literally “pierced the roof and two floors”, testified Alejandro Otero on X (ex-Twitter). The object would have weighed less than a kilo and would have struck the house in the city of Naples, Florida, according to testimony collected by the media Ars Technica. The photos published by the American show a semi-cylindrical gray object and a hole in a floor.
In 2021, NASA released a pallet containing old batteries from the ISS. These gradually fell back towards Earth, but without means of propulsion, it was an “uncontrolled re-entry”. NASA said in March that it had conducted an in-depth analysis and determined that the pallet “would reenter the atmosphere without danger”.
Precedents
According to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, the time communicated by the resident concerning the fallen object, as well as its location, could actually correspond to a piece of this cargo, taking into account the trajectory coordinates made public.
Incidents of the same type have already taken place in the past. In 2022, Australian authorities, for example, confirmed that charred space debris that fell into a sheep enclosure came from a SpaceX device.