It took a minute (or more than a month) but NASA finally confirmed this Florida man’s misfortune.
Earlier this month, we reported on a man from Florida whose roof and two floors were pierced by an unindentified object that appeared to have fallen from space.
The space junk fell on Alejandro Otero’s house on March 8th and, while the man wasn’t at home to witness it, his son was. The security cameras were on as well, and Otero posted the video of the impact.
While the video of the space trash destroying his home went viral, authorities said absolutely nothing, and Otero’s emails and messages to NASA went unanswered.
Now, more than a month since the incident, NASA confirmed that the object in question came from the International Space Station (ISS).
From an NBC report:
“NASA said it had analyzed the object at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and confirmed that it was part of the equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.
The piece of space junk is roughly cylindrical in shape and is about 4-inches tall and 1.6-inches wide. NASA said agency staff studied the object’s features and metal composition and matched it to the hardware that had been jettisoned from the space station in 2021.
At that time, new lithium-ion batteries had recently been installed at the space station, so the old nickel hydrogen batteries were packed up for disposal. The space station’s robotic arm released the 5,800-pound cargo pallet containing the batteries over the Pacific Ocean, as the outpost orbited 260 miles above the Earth’s surface, according to NASA.
NASA said it will perform a detailed investigation of the latest debris incident to determine how the object withstood the extreme trip through the atmosphere. “
NASA concluded their announcement saying they remain “committed to responsibly operating in low Earth orbit” and protecting people from risks such as space debris.
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