2024-04-22 20:33:00
Engineers from the American Space Exploration Agency analyzed the cylindrical disk “coming from the sky”, which cut into a house in Naples on the afternoon of March 8. The owner of the house, Alejandro Otero, posted photos of X, while asking for help contacting NASA: ” […] a piece of space pierced the roof of my house in Naples and passed through both floors. She almost hit my son.”
Meanwhile, the scientific journal Ars Technica wrote that this piece almost certainly came from the International Space Station (ISS), which was confirmed last week. Especially since the US space monitoring center had recorded the re-entry of debris into the atmosphere, just above the Gulf of Mexico. He was on his way to southwest Florida at 2:29 p.m. that day, just five minutes before the security camera at Otero’s home picked up the sound of the crash.
The first plan
A NASA spokesman, Josh Finch, said analysis to determine the exact origin of the debris confirmed that the two-pound piece was part of a pallet of obsolete 2.9-ton batteries, space junk. It was ejected from the ISS in March 2021, which was the largest object by mass ever ejected from the orbital station at the time.
The uncontrolled disposal of the pallet was not part of NASA’s original plan, but became necessary after the failure of a Soyuz rocket launch in 2018, preventing two astronauts from traveling to the ISS to continue work. The battery change was therefore not completed in time for the outdated pallet to return aboard the HTV (transfer vehicle) which left for Earth at the end of 2018.
In March 2021, NASA made the decision to release the batch independently using the Canadian arm. The ISS needed space and new cargo ships, such as SpaceX, Cygnus, etc., cannot accommodate an HTV that guarantees disintegration of all objects on board upon entry into the atmosphere. Without propulsion, the battery pad therefore drifted in orbit until aerodynamic drag brought it back into the atmosphere on March 8, 2024, almost exactly three years after it was ejected.
Expected event
The monstrous debris was expected to make an “uncontrolled” re-entry to Earth between March 7 and 9, 2024. Also, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell wrote on the X-Platform that this object would not burn up completely when it return. He predicted that about 1,000 pounds of fragments would likely reach the Earth’s surface. The exact locations of the reintegration of the pieces of the giant waste remain unknown, except for the one that pierced the house in Naples.
The bill
Meanwhile, Mr. Otero must repair the damage and try to figure out who will be responsible for paying the bill!
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