Who needs aircon when you have NASA to punch holes through your home?
NASA has confirmed that a piece of space junk that crashed through a Florida home in March was a fragment of a discarded ISS battery pallet.
The pallet was jettisoned from the International Space Station on January 11, 2021. On March 8, 2024, it made aninto the Earth's atmosphere. The hope was that most – if not all – of the debris would burn up during the re-entry, although at the time Astronomer Jonathan McDowellMcDowell was correct. Fragments did make it to the surface, and – worse – one piece, weighing in at 1.6 pounds , crashed through the house of Alejandro Otero in Naples, Florida.
However, at 1.6 pounds , it is a good deal heavier and could easily have caused more serious damage than adding some unwanted ventilation to Otero's home. He noted that it almost hit his son during its passage through the house.NASA said it would be updating the models it uses to predict how objects break up during re-entry and that the ISS team would investigate the jettison of the cargo pallet to better understand the cause of the debris's survival.
The incident is a reminder of all the hardware, much of which can be classed as debris, which is passing overhead. While space agencies including NASA and ESA have made efforts in recent years to ensure the re-entry of debris occurs in a controlled manner, others are not quite so careful.
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