He thought so! LiveScience recently reported on Alejandro Otero, who in 2021 was pretty sure the weird chunk of stuff that crashed through his roof in Naples, Florida, was a battery pack from the International Space Station. Well, he concluded correctly:
Otero said he thought the offending object was part of a cargo pallet packed with 5,800 pounds (2,630 kilograms) of aging batteries jettisoned from the ISS in March 2021.
And he was right, according to a new NASA analysis of the object, which was performed at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.
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The cylindrical piece of space junk is made of a metallic alloy called Inconel, they added. It weighs 1.6 pounds (0.7 kg) and measures 4 inches (10 centimeters) high by 1.6 inches (4 cm) wide.
The nickel-hydride batteries were dumped after new lithium-ion versions were delivered to the ISS for a power-supply upgrade. The pallet and the batteries were expected to burn up completely in Earth’s atmosphere, NASA officials said in today’s update — yet that didn’t happen, and the agency wants to learn why.
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According to the European Space Agency, Earth orbit hosts about 36,500 pieces of space junk at least 4 inches (10 cm) wide, and a whopping 130 million objects at least 1 millimeter in diameter. Even these tiny shards pose a danger to satellites and other orbiting assets, given the tremendous speeds at which they travel. For example, at 250 miles (400 kilometers) up — the average altitude of the ISS — orbital velocity is about 17,000 mph (27,400 kph).
And, as has been demonstrated, some of this junk comes crashing back to Earth from time to time. For instance, the 23-ton core stages of China’s powerful Long March 5B rocket routinely fall in an uncontrolled fashion a week or so after their launches, to the consternation of the international space community.