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Related article<\/span> Mystery cylinder on Western Australia beach likely space junk, authorities say<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n After analyzing the piece of debris at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, NASA confirmed it was indeed a piece of discarded space station cargo, according to a statement released by the agency on Monday. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d NASA said in the statement. <\/p>\n
The federal agency did not immediately respond to additional questions about the investigation or whether the agency had changed any plans for future space station trash disposal. <\/p>\n
NASA routinely brings home batches of science experiments, cargo and garbage from the space station using capsules such as the Dragon spacecraft built by SpaceX. <\/p>\n
But after the installation of new batteries on the space station in 2021, authorities disposed of a pallet of aging nickel-hydrogen batteries in a different way. <\/p>\n
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<\/span>video <\/div>\n<\/div>\n Related video<\/span> This is what 100 million pieces of space debris looks like<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A robotic arm pried the garbage, weighing roughly as much as an SUV, from the space station\u2019s exterior and flung it into Earth\u2019s orbit, according to NASA. The federal agency\u2019s plan hinged on the belief that the discarded batteries, traveling at more than 22 times the speed of sound, would eventually be incinerated as they struck the atmosphere. <\/p>\n
The garbage \u201cwill orbit Earth between two to four years before burning up harmlessly,\u201d NASA said when the pallet was jettisoned on March 11, 2021. <\/p>\n
The European Space Agency, which routinely tracks objects in space that are headed for Earth, said in a March 8 statement, \u201cWhile some parts may reach the ground, the casualty risk \u2013 the likelihood of a person being hit \u2013 is very low. <\/p>\n
\u201cLarge uncertainties, primarily driven by fluctuating levels of atmospheric drag, prevent more precise predictions at this time,\u201d according to the ESA, which is one of NASA\u2019s partners on the orbiting laboratory. <\/p>\n
To be clear, there are thousands of pieces of uncontrolled junk in space, including discarded rocket parts, defunct satellites, and debris from satellite collisions and weapons tests. <\/p>\n
The vast majority of the detritus does fully burn up as it hurdles toward Earth. <\/p>\n
However, other massive objects have made an uncontrolled return from space before, including a 22-ton rocket body built in China that in 2022 was discarded in the Pacific Ocean. Pieces of the rocket likely survived, sinking to the bottom of the sea. Members of the international aerospace community, including NASA, widely criticized the China National Space Administration for the move. <\/p>\n
But the debris that struck Otero\u2019s house was the result of miscalculations about how space garbage would behave. <\/p>\n
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Related article<\/span> Crew safe after Soyuz launch aborted 20 seconds before liftoff<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n NASA already has strong policies in place to prevent objects from colliding in space \u2014 or impacting populated areas on Earth, said John Crassidis, a space debris expert and Moog Professor of Innovation at the University at Buffalo\u2019s School of Engineering and Applied Science. <\/p>\n
But, in this case, the federal agency\u2019s assumption that the debris it cast aside in 2021 would not pose a threat to people on the ground when it plunged back toward Earth in March was a grave mistake. The space agency should be more conservative in its analysis if it attempts a similar trash disposal method in the future, he added. <\/p>\n
\u201cI think this was a good wake-up call to say, \u2018Hey we need to do better\u2019 \u2014 and the US should not ever have been in a situation where something came down like this and went through a house in Florida,\u201d Crassidis said. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
This post appeared first on cnn.com<\/div>\n
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A piece of garbage jettisoned from the International Space Station unexpectedly survived a fiery reentry from orbit last month and pierced the roof of a home in Florida, according to NASA. When the federal agency disposed of a slab of spaceborne refuse weighing about 5,800 pounds (2,630 kilograms), it expected the trash to disintegrate as it plunged <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1971,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1970","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}