Featured Image Credit: X/@Alejandro0tero
A Florida resident claims that space debris crashed through his roof and penetrated two floors deep into his home in early March.
Alejandro Otero says the object, which looks like a sort of large charred cylinder of metal, crashed into his home and almost hit his son, and posted a series of photos and video to back up his point.
The debris is now thought to have come from an EP-9 equipment pallet that was jettisoned from the International Space Station early last month.
Hello. Looks like one of those pieces missed Ft Myers and landed in my house in Naples.
— Alejandro Otero (@Alejandro0tero) March 15, 2024
Tore through the roof and went thru 2 floors. Almost his my son.
Can you please assist with getting NASA to connect with me? I’ve left messages and emails without a response. pic.twitter.com/Yi29f3EwyV
This pallet is about the size of a family van and is designed to carry equipment around the outside of the ISS for easy access while conducting spacewalks and repair missions.
It was jettisoned after nearly four years of use after being launched to the ISS in May 2020, and was designed to help in the replacement of older batteries on the station with newer, higher-tech versions.
Advert
It's also the largest object that has ever been jettisoned from the ISS, and this situation might lead to some discussion about how these disposals are carried out.
Astronomer Jonathan McDowell was tracking the debris carefully, and reported on X that the EP-9 equipment pallet re-entered our atmosphere on 8 March at 7:29 PM UTC, somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico between Cancun and Cuba.
That observation prompted Otero to post in response with photographs of the object that struck his house, speculating that it was probably from the EP-9, a theory that McDowell agreed with.
Otero, who spoke to Wink News, was rightly looking to reach out to the relevant authorities, and McDowell confirmed that in this case it actually wouldn't be NASA's area of responsibility, instead pointing to the Aerospace Corporation in this case.
For now, there's set to be plenty of analysis about what happened in this case, and it will hopefully lead to a resolution where the ISS is able to better plan its jettisoning actions to ensure that items burn up in their entirety upon re-entry.
That sort of burn-up would ensure that solid items like this don't fall to Earth in a way that puts people at risk, since their trajectories are pretty much impossible to directly control as they fall.
Despite that, it's rare to have "deorbits", as they're called, land over locations like Florida, as they're usually timed to successfully aim for large areas of open ocean, which are the safest areas for any debris to land that doesn't burn up.
This is all set to become a bigger problem as space fills up with debris, too - the Federal Aviation Authority published a report last year estimating that by 2035 someone on Earth could be killed or injured by debris twice a year.
