An Unfortunate Incident: Space Debris Falls on a House in Florida
On the preliminary stage, an American named Alejandro Otepo shared on Twitter that space debris fell on his house and pierced two floors. Luckily, the house was empty at the time of the incident, and no one was injured. Later, NASA confirmed that it was part of the equipment discarded from the International Space Station in 2021. Details are posted on the agency’s official website.
NASA’s Explanation of the Incident
According to NASA, in March 2021, ground operators detached a cargo module containing outdated nickel-hydride batteries using a robotic system on the ISS after replacing them with lithium-ion batteries. It was expected that the equipment would burn up when entering Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, 2024, but part of it survived and fell onto a house in Naples, Florida.
The agency also stated that the total weight of the equipment released from the ISS was about 2630 kg. The surviving element is a bracket used to secure the ISS batteries on the cargo module, weighing 1.6 kg, with a height of 10.16 cm and a diameter of 4.06 cm, made of a metal alloy called inconel.
