NASA on Monday confirmed the object that struck a home last month in Naples, Fla., tearing through its roof and damaging the flooring, was in fact a piece of hardware from the International Space Station.
Homeowner Alejandro Otero wasn't home when a piece of space junk came crashing through his roof on March 8, but his son was. Otero returned from a vacation early to assess the damage, and sent photos to local outlet WINK News.
A Nest home security camera captured the sound of the crash, which Otero told the outlet was "tremendous."
“It was a tremendous sound. It almost hit my son. He was two rooms over and heard it all,” he said.
Because of the timing, space-watchers believed the object could have been connected to a pallet of batteries that was released from the space station three years before, and the object was sent to NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida for analysis.
In March 2021, the space station's robotic arm jettisoned a pallet filled with old nickel hydride batteries — about 5,800 pounds worth — after new lithium-ion batteries were installed as part of power upgrades.
"The hardware was expected to fully burn up during entry through Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, 2024," NASA said Monday. "However, a piece of hardware survived."
The space agency said the object was not a battery, but a "stanchion from the NASA flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet."
The object, made of the metal allow Inconel, weighs 1.6 pounds, and measures 4 inches tall with a 1.6-inch diameter. A photo shared by NASA shows the object apparently a bit melted and warped compared to the original hardware, but still nearly the same size.
NASA said its engineers will now update models that predict how jettisoned materials will — or won't — burn up during re-entry in the Earth's atmosphere.
"The International Space Station will perform a detailed investigation of the jettison and re-entry analysis to determine the cause of the debris survival and to update modeling and analysis, as needed," the agency said. "NASA specialists use engineering models to estimate how objects heat up and break apart during atmospheric re-entry. These models require detailed input parameters and are regularly updated when debris is found to have survived atmospheric re-entry to the ground."
Story via TMX