NASA said on Tuesday it was studying an object that crashed into a man’s home in Florida, which they suspect could be a piece of debris that was dumped from the International Space Station.
Alejandro Otero of Naples, Florida said on X the piece “tore through the roof and went (through) 2 floors” of his house, almost hitting his son on March 8.
He thinks it was a part from a cargo pallet containing old batteries that NASA ground control teams dispatched from its orbital outpost in 2021.
According to official projections, it was expected to burn harmlessly above Earth’s atmosphere.
Otero posted a clip from his home Nest video camera where the sound of it crashing was heard.
“So that’s 1934 UTC, which is very consistent with the Space Force estimate of reentry over the Gulf at 1929 UTC,” astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell wrote in response. “I think you may be right and it’s a bit from the reentry of the EP-9 battery pallet.”
“NASA collected an item in cooperation with the homeowner, and we will analyze the object at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida as soon as possible to determine its origin,” the space agency said in a statement to AFP on Tuesday.
Although the batteries were owned by NASA, they were attached to a pallet structure that Japan’s space agency launched, possibly making a complex situation with liability, Ars Technica news outlet said.
A SpaceX Dragon capsule landed on an Australian sheep farm in 2022 and NASA has criticized China for letting its giant Long March rockets to fall back to Earth.
