Space junk from the ISS station fell through American homes

NASA announced on April 2 that they were analyzing an object that fell from the sky and hit a house in Florida, most likely trash from the ISS station .

Alejandro Otero , a resident of Naples, Florida, USA, posted on social network March 8. The object was a cylinder several inches long (1 inch is about 2.5 cm) and weighed about 0.9 kg. The origin of the object has not yet been determined, but Otero believes that this may be one of 9 batteries that have exhausted their energy and were thrown away from the International Space Station (ISS).

The object fell on the house of Alejandro Otero, a resident of Florida, USA. (Photo: X/Alejandro Otero).

Previously, also on March 8, a shelf containing batteries from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) fell back into the Earth's atmosphere, above the Gulf of Mexico. Thrown away from the ISS station in 2021, this trash is then expected to burn up in the atmosphere. However, it appears that a piece of trash has made it through this reentry process.

Otero returned the object that hit his house to NASA. "NASA cooperated with the host to collect the object and will analyze it at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida as soon as possible to determine the origin," Joshua Finch, a NASA spokesman, told the website. Live Science on April 2. Once engineers determine the object's origin, Otero can claim compensation for repairs to his home, but the process will become complicated if it belongs to JAXA.

Space junk falls through people's houses. (Photo: X/Alejandro Otero)

Florida isn't the only place hit by space debris. Four pieces of China's Long March 5B rocket fell on Ivory Coast, Borneo and the Indian Ocean between 2020 and 2022. In 2021 and 2022, debris from SpaceX rockets fell on farms in the state Washington and another farm in Australia.

Space agencies around the world are trying to track more than 30,000 of the largest pieces of space junk, but many other pieces are too small to track. Scientists have proposed many measures to clean up the space around Earth, such as collecting trash using nets, robotic arms, or launching a long rope from another spacecraft to catch pieces of trash.