NASA has completed the analysis of a chunk of metal that crashed into the roof of a house in Naples, Florida, a few weeks ago. The agency says it came from a palette of trash released from the International Space Station three years ago.
Naples, Florida has mostly been in the news lately because it’s the home and headquarters of presidential candidate, Donald Trump. But last month, the town appeared in the headlines for another, stranger reason: a two-story Naples home owned by Alejandro Otero had a pretty hefty piece of metal rip through its roof and both floors. Otero was on vacation at the time of the incident, but his son was home.
“It was a tremendous sound. It almost hit my son. He was two rooms over and heard it all,” Otero told a reporter from CBS affiliate WINK, who first reported the March 8 crash. “Something ripped through the house and then made a big hole on the floor and on the ceiling,” he added. “When we heard that, we were like, impossible, and then immediately I thought a meteorite.”
According to Ars Technica, a Nest security camera captured the sound of the metallic chunk tearing through the house at 2:34 PM Florida time on March 8, which happened to be about the time US Space Command recorded space debris from the ISS re-entering the atmosphere.
That debris hailed from a pallet weighing 5,800 pounds (2.6 metric tons) that was cut loose from the ISS in March 2021. The pallet contained old nickel hydride batteries that had been replaced. Normally, such a pallet would have been returned in a controlled manner, but scheduling conflicts stemming from a failed Russian rocket that was meant to deliver the batteries caused a domino effect that led to the batteries being jettisoned as part of the biggest pallet of waste ever released from the ISS.
NASA
Fast forward to March 2024, and it seems a piece of that pallet didn’t burn up in the thousand-degree conditions created by our atmosphere during re-entry of space-based objects.
Having just completed its analysis, NASA has said that the metallic chunk, which weighs 1.6 lb (0.7 kg) and measures 4 inches (10 cm) in height and 1.6 inches (4 cm) in diameter, was made of Inconel, a nickel-chromium alloy frequently used in applications that are exposed to high temperatures. The space agency also believes the item was a stanchion used to mount the batteries to the jettisoned cargo pallet, but is unsure how it survived the multi-thousand degree temperatures created during re-entry.
“The International Space Station will perform a detailed investigation of the jettison and re-entry analysis to determine the cause of the debris survival and to update modeling and analysis, as needed,” said NASA in a statement. “NASA specialists use engineering models to estimate how objects heat up and break apart during atmospheric re-entry. These models require detailed input parameters and are regularly updated when debris is found to have survived atmospheric re-entry to the ground.”
The ESA, the agency that tracked the re-entry of the space junk, added: “A large space object re-enters the atmosphere in a natural way approximately once per week, with the majority of the associated fragments burning up before reaching the ground. Most spacecraft, launch vehicles and operational hardware are designed to limit the risks associated with a re-entry.”
