NASA Confirms It Was Space Debris That Crashed Through Roof of Florida Family ’s Home

The risk of being injured by falling space debris is supposedly “under 1 in 100 billion,” according to the European Space Agency (ESA), but for one family in Naples, it came very close after a piece of junk from the International Space Station (ISS) tore through their roof last month. “I was shaking. I was completely in disbelief. What are the chances of something landing on my house with such force to cause so much damage,” Alejandro Otero, who resided in the home with the rest of his family, told Southwest Florida TV channel WINK. “I’m super grateful that nobody got hurt.” [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] NASA confirmed on Monday, after analyzing the space debris in cooperation with the family, that what was initially a mystery object was actually a chunk of metal alloy Inconel that was expected to have disintegrated as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere on March 8. NASA said the cylindrical-shaped object—which was 4 in. tall, 1.6 in. wide, and weighed 1.6 lbs.—was part of a cargo pallet of aging nickel hydride batteries that the ISS released back in 2021. The total mass of the released hardware was about 2.6 tons (about the same as an African forest elephant), and according to NASA, “specialists use engineering models to estimate how objects heat up and break apart during atmospheric re-entry.” After the unintended survival of what NASA said was a stanchion of the pallet, the I...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized News Desk overnight Source Type: news