NASA is investigating the bizarre incident in which a sizable piece of metal believed to be part of a pallet of discarded batteries from the International Space Station crashed onto the roof of a Florida home.
The engineers of the American agency are analyzing the cylindrical plate, which weighs about 1.5 kg and which pierced the roof of the house in Naples in the afternoon of March 8.
“It was an extraordinary noise. My son was in another room and heard everything,” said the owner of the house, Alejandro Otero, quoted by The Guardian. “Something fell through the house and then it made a big hole in the floor and the ceiling.”
The scientific magazine Ars Technica stated that the most likely explanation is that the piece came from the space station (ISS). The U.S. Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris over the Gulf of Mexico on a trajectory toward southwest Florida at 2:29 p.m. that day, just five minutes before a security camera at Otero’s home captured the sound of the crash.
A 2.9-ton pallet used to upgrade a battery on the ISS was jettisoned in March 2024, being the largest object by mass ever ejected from the orbital outpost, NASA said at the time
It was due to make an “uncontrolled re-entry” sometime between March 7 and 9, Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell, posting on X that “it will not burn up completely on re-entry”.
“About half a ton of fragments will probably hit the Earth’s surface,” McDowell wrote.
Otero responded to McDowell’s tweet with photos of the damage and said he left messages at NASA, but there was no response. Now, he wants to know who will pay for the damage to his house.
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