Space travel: part of the ISS crashed in the Atlantic

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Space travel
Part of the ISS crashed in the Atlantic

An external pallet with used nickel-hydrogen batteries is released by a robotic arm on the ISS. photo

© NASA/dpa

A discarded battery pack from the ISS space station has been flying around the earth for three years – and has come ever closer to our planet. Now it has crashed in the Atlantic.

The discarded space station battery pack ISS crashed over the Atlantic on Friday evening. 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”. It had previously also flown over Germany. At 7:21 p.m. the package came from the west and flew over the middle of Germany at an altitude of 139 kilometers.

There had previously been concerns that debris could fall onto the Federal Republic, although that was considered very unlikely. The space situation center gave the all-clear in the evening.

The object was a pallet containing nine disused batteries from the International Space Station (ISS). The platform with battery packs was about the size of a car and weighed around 2.6 tons. It was detached from the ISS in March 2021 with the aim of later burning up in the atmosphere.

Several organizations, including the Federal Ministry of Economics responsible for space travel and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), had already informed about the battery pack on Thursday.

dpa

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