NASA announces that it wants to analyze an “object” that a resident of Florida says fell on his house and that could come from the dumping of waste from the International Space Station (ISS), AFP reports, News.ro transmits.
“NASA has recovered an object in cooperation with the owner,” a spokesman for the American space agency told AFP on Tuesday.
It is to be “analyzed at the Kennedy Space Center, in Florida, as quickly as possible, in order to establish its origin”.
The object, which weighs less than a kilogram, pierced the roof of a resident’s house in the city of Naples, in Florida, on March 3, according to testimonies collected by the publication Ars Technica.
The respective resident, Alejandro Otero, published on X photos of a gray, semi-cylindrical object and holes in the ceiling.
The object “perforated the roof in two stages”, he wrote on the social network.
On March 8, a more special space “package” was to enter the atmosphere.
In 2021, NASA released a pallet of old batteries from the ISS. They fell, one by one, towards Earth, but, lacking a means of propulsion, it was an “uncontrolled re-entry”.
NASA announced in March that it had conducted an in-depth analysis and determined that the pallet “re-entered the atmosphere without danger”.
According to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, the time communicated by the resident regarding the fall of the object and its place could correspond to a part of this load, based on the trajectories made public.
Similar incidents have occurred in the past.
In 2022, Australian authorities confirmed that a charred space fragment that fell into a sheep pen came from a SpaceX device.
