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The International Space Station has been orbiting the Earth for over 25 years without any major incidents, but it appears it played a role in a pretty wild occurrence that led to the owner of a home in Naples, Florida seeking answers thanks to what unfolded last month.
Mankind hasn’t exactly done a great job keeping outer space clean since it first set its sights on the stars in the middle of the 20th century. The Earth is currently orbited by more than 9,000 tons of “space junk” that have caused headaches for the folks tasked with operating the International Space Station, which is covered with shields to minimize the damage stemming from impact with those pieces of debris.
The ISS also produces more than 5,000 pounds of trash per year, and its approach to disposing of that waste largely consists of launching it into the Earth’s atmosphere and allowing it to burn up thanks to the forces generated during reentry.
That was the strategy NASA adopted in 2021 when it disposed of a 2.9-ton pallet of nickel-hydrogen batteries that was expected to remain in orbit for between two and four years before reentering the atmosphere, at which point the agency asserted it would take care of itself by “burning up harmlessly.”
However, it appears things didn’t exactly go according to plan.
The pallet began to fall back down to Earth on March 8th over the Gulf of Mexico before a Naples resident named Alejandro Otero shared a picture of a metal cylinder that had ripped through the roof of his house and made its way through two floors before coming to rest.
According to WINK News, Otero’s son was home at the time but thankfully wasn’t struck by the somewhat mysterious object that weighs close to two pounds. UPI reports the cylinder was eventually handed over to NASA, which is currently conducting an investigation in the hopes of determining its origins.