The cylindrical object that violently impacted a home in Miami on March 8, It is a metal support that was used on the International Space Station (ISS). This was confirmed by NASA, after carrying out expert reports on the strange piece.
The object, barely 10 cm high by 4 cm wide, fell on a home in Naples, Florida. Although its size is similar to the palm of a hand, the impact pierced the roof and two floors of the house, and by a few meters it did not hurt the child who was in one of the rooms.
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“It caused a tremendous sound. It almost hit my son, who was two rooms away from the impact and heard everything“said Alejandro Otero, the owner of the home, who reported the event immediately.
NASA collected the object and analyzed it at the Kennedy Space Center to determine its origin. From the first moment, the strongest hypothesis was that it came from the ISS. Now NASA confirmed it. It is about from a fragment of a battery holder that was released in March 2021after an update of the energy sources at the Station.
“The debris was a NASA flight support equipment strut used to hold batteries on the loading platform. The object is made of Inconel metal alloy, weighs 7.2 kilos, measures 10 cm in height and 4 cm in diameter,” the Agency explained in a statement.
“(The remains) were expected to burn up completely during entry into Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, 2024. However, a piece of hardware survived re-entry and hit a house in Naples, Florida,” they added from NASA.
Is it very likely that space debris will fall?
According to estimates, There are about a million objects orbiting our planet, like a large metal network. There are large disused satellites, but there are also remains of rockets and collisions between objects, which measure just a few centimeters. In total, there are about 8,000 tons of what is called space junk.
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All the artifacts that human beings send to the Earth’s orbit, Sooner or later they will re-enter the atmosphere. This happens because the gravitational force of the Earth little by little brings them closer.
The vast majority of these objects disintegrate when passing through the atmosphere, by friction. But some, as in this case, manage to survive re-entry and reach the surface.
Space agencies use models to evaluate the response of materials to re-entry into the atmosphere, and ensure their disintegration or, if applicable, calculate precisely where debris could fall.
In this case, NASA will analyze why the object managed to survive. “NASA specialists use engineering models to estimate how objects heat up and break up during re-entry into the atmosphere. These models require detailed input parameters and are periodically updated when debris is found to have survived atmospheric re-entry to the ground,” explains NASA.
However, there are other plans. There are projects to go out and collect space debris and remove it from Earth’s orbit, or ensure its destruction upon re-entry into the atmosphere.
Such is the case, for example, of the mission ClearSpace-1from the European Space Agency, which In 2025 it will test new technologies for capturing disused satellitessecure “destructive entry,” and chart the path for sustainable space exploration.
