Emily Chan
Back in March, a piece of space garbage from the International Space Station unexpectedly reentered Earth’s orbit and crashed through the roof of a home in Florida. The family who owns the house is now asking NASA to cover the damages.
When the federal agency disposed of some space junk that weighed about 5,800 pounds, officials believed the garbage would disintegrate in Earth’s atmosphere. But a small chunk of the debris managed to survive and crashed into a home in Naples, Florida.
The incident took place on March 8. The homeowner, Alejandro Otero, claimed that the trash tore through the roof and two floors of the house, narrowly missing his son.
The object left a gaping hole in the ceiling and floor. Otero was grateful that nobody got hurt, but he pointed out that the situation could have easily been a catastrophic one.
After analyzing the debris at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA confirmed that it came from a 2.9-ton pallet of used nickel-hydrogen batteries jettisoned from the International Space Station in 2021. At the time, new batteries were installed on the space station, so they needed to get rid of the old ones.
However, the old batteries were disposed of in a different way than usual. According to NASA, a robotic arm removed the garbage from the exterior of the space station and flung it into Earth’s orbit.
Since the batteries would be traveling at more than 22 times faster than the speed of sound, the agency expected that they would take two to four years to burn up.
The European Space Agency stated that some objects in space might reach the ground, but the chances of them hitting a person are very low.
There are thousands of space junk pieces currently floating around in space, and most of them burn up as they plunge toward Earth.
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