An object that hit a Florida home in March was part of debris released from the International Space Station three years earlier, NASA has revealed.
Homeowner Alejandro Otero recently told television station WINK that he was on vacation when his son told him what had happened to his house in Naples. Otero came home early to check on the house, finding the object had ripped through his ceiling and torn up the flooring.
“I was shaking. I was completely in disbelief. What are the chances of something landing on my house with such force to cause so much damage,” Otero said. “I’m super grateful that nobody got hurt.”
NASA said the hand-sized chunk of metal came from a pallet of nickel hydride batteries jettisoned from the ISS in March 2021 after new lithium-ion batteries arrived at the station.
The debris, weighing less than 2 pounds, was determined to be part of the support equipment in space used to mount the batteries onto a cargo pallet. The entire pallet weighed about 5,800 pounds, and NASA expected it to burn up entirely on reentry.
In cooperation with the homeowner, NASA obtained the remaining piece that struck the home on March 8 and analyzed it at Kennedy Space Center.
To ensure a similar debris incident doesn’t happen again, NASA said ISS teams will do a detailed investigation of the jettison and reentry.
“NASA specialists use engineering models to estimate how objects heat up and break apart during atmospheric reentry,” NASA posted in its update late Monday. “These models … regularly updated when debris is found to have survived atmospheric reentry to the ground.”
Debris from cast-off launch rocket stages and deorbiting hardware remain a threat if it doesn’t burn up.
“NASA remains committed to responsibly operating in low-Earth orbit, and mitigating as much risk as possible to protect people on Earth when space hardware must be released,” the NASA statement said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
