2024-04-05 09:52:20
In March, a block of space debris weighing several tons entered the Earth’s atmosphere. According to media reports, part of it may have fallen onto a house.
Part of the block of space debris that crashed above Earth on March 8th apparently hit a residential building in the USA. As the US magazine “Ars Technica” reports, a house in Florida was damaged by a piece weighing around two kilograms, which presumably came from the block.
The cylindrical piece, which was only a few centimeters in size, fell through the roof of the house and pierced both floors of the two-story house. The homeowner’s son was at home at the time. But no one was injured, it is said.
A surveillance camera recorded the sound of the crash on March 8th at 2:34 p.m. local time. The time coincides with the re-entry of the debris coming from the International Space Station (ISS). At the time, the block that burned up in the atmosphere was over the Gulf of Mexico on its way to Florida.
Separated from the ISS in 2021
NASA employees are currently examining the object to find out whether the piece is actually a piece of fallen ISS debris. That’s not unlikely. The European space agency Esa announced in March that parts of the scrap could end up on Earth.
The space debris, which originally weighed around 2,600 kilograms, was a platform with battery packs that was separated from the International Space Station (ISS) on March 21, 2021. The pile of rubbish then circled the earth for three years.
The US space agency NASA said in a statement that the battery pallet would “burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere.” Three years ago, she triggered the decoupling of the garbage heap from mission control in Houston (US state of Texas) using the ISS robot arm Canadarm2 and captured it in images.
Low risk for Germany
The pallet with the ISS’s old batteries also flew over Germany when it re-entered. Several organizations, including the Federal Ministry of Economics, which is responsible for space travel, and the German Aerospace Center (DLR), had informed about the battery pack – and spoke of a low risk for Germany.
As the ESA reports, no one has yet been killed by falling space debris. The risk of being injured by such a part is less than 1 in 100 billion. Because most of the earth is covered by oceans, most objects from space end up in water, the DLR says on its website.
Nevertheless, there are reports to the contrary, as “Ars Technica” writes. A resident in Oklahoma was said to have been hit in the shoulder by a small rocket fragment in 1997. In 1969, part of a Soviet space probe hit a Japanese ship off the coast of Siberia, injuring five people, they say.