Posted on 04/02/2024 12:35:17 PM PDT by Red Badger
Space Junkie A sizable cylindrical object crashed through the roof of Alexandro Otero's home in Naples, Florida — and experts believe it may have originated from the International Space Station.
While NASA scientists have since recovered the debris and are currently analyzing it, Ars Technica reports, we still don't have confirmation that the 2-pound object came from space.
But given the evidence, there's a decent chance it once belonged to the aging orbital outpost.
Pictures shared by Otero on X-formerly-Twitter show the carnage, with the object punching through wood and drywall with ease.
"It was a tremendous sound," Otero recalled in an interview with local CBS-affiliated news station WINK. "It almost hit my son. He was two rooms over and heard it all."
Punching Holes
According to Ars' reporting, Otero's Nest home security camera recorded the sound of the object crashing through his roof, just minutes after the US Space Command recorded the reentry of a piece of space debris. Its orbital path also placed it somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico, making its way toward Florida, where Otero resides.
Otero may even have a case in trying to make a claim against the federal government to pay for the hole in his roof.
"It gets more interesting if this material is discovered to be not originally from the United States," Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi, told Ars. "If it is a human-made space object which was launched into space by another country, which caused damage on Earth, that country would be absolutely liable to the homeowner for the damage caused."
The debris, per the report, may have once belonged to a cargo pallet that was jettisoned from the space station, reentering the atmosphere on March 8. The NASA-owned pallet, however, was originally launched by the Japanese space agency, which could complicate matters.
For now, we await word from NASA.
"More information will be available once the analysis is complete," space agency spokesperson Josh Finch told Ars.
Probably the same junk.............
I thought these things burned up during re-entry?
I’m a space cowboy
Bet you weren’t ready for that
Mostly, yes, but sometimes they split up and pieces that are denser can make it to the ground...............
Some call me the Gangster of Love..................
Why don’t they ground NASA for 6 months while they do an “incident report” like they do when SpaceX does anything that’s not near that close to ending human life.
It was launched by Japan.................
If it’s NASA junk, they intentionally minimized the impact of something off the ISS surviving. I’d not have given the piece to them, but would have called a lawyer and evidence specialist first.
Watch his insurance company fight tooth and nail against any payout until it is determined exactly what this is.
That’s a big repair bill he’s looking at - roof, ceilings, floors, etc.
Meteors entering into (and burning up in) the Earth's atmosphere typically have initial velocities of 30 km/s. The ISS, in contrast, orbits at a velocity of a mere 8 km/s. When a fragment of "space junk" is jettisoned from the ISS, it is thus traveling at a much lower speed, resulting in less degradation as it falls.
Regards,
Check all recent Boeing overflights.
Part of a Boeing aircraft.
Dam you now i got that song stuck in my head
I have sitting in my office at my house a smooth black rock, clearly iron or metal of some kind, that popped through the roof of our horse barn. About the size of a baseball.
No big smoking crater. Wasn’t hot to the touch. No crater of any kind, really.
Just a loud bang and a pretty good sized hole through the 1X4s that make up the roof.
Despite the lack of dramatic entry, I’ve always assumed it was a meteor. Maybe it was space junk.
I’d check with Boeing.
It starts out much bigger...
Believe it or not that is a covered peril.
why does NASA get to keep it ?
Carnage???
Inigo Montoya said it best ...
Really dense pieces make it to the ground. Also extremely not-dense pieces make it to the ground.
Dense: small presented area, too much material; doesn't completely burn up on the way down.
Not-dense: slows very quickly due to relatively large presented area and little mass, doesn't get hot enough to burn up.
F=mA.
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