As of: March 7, 2024, 10:46 a.m
By: Tanja Banner
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The battery pack that the ISS dropped in March 2021 is falling towards Earth.
(Archive image) © imago images/ZUMA Wire/Nasa
A pallet of old batteries from the ISS has been orbiting the Earth for three years.
Space debris is expected to hit Earth tomorrow.
Maybe not everything will burn up.
Munich - In March 2021, a pallet with batteries was dropped from the International Space Station ISS, which has been orbiting the Earth ever since.
Weighing 2.6 tons, it was the heaviest object ever dropped from the ISS.
The plan: The pallet with the old batteries would orbit the Earth for two to four years and then enter the Earth's atmosphere.
Now the time has apparently come.
As
Bild
reports, citing the Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection, the battery block is expected to hit the earth on Friday (March 8th).
A large part of the space debris is likely to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.
The block is expected to break into hundreds of fragments, the newspaper said.
However, fragments can also fall to the ground.
In Germany, according to the report, a 35-kilometer-wide corridor that stretches across Germany may be affected.
ISS sends battery pack into space - it now falls to Earth
The pallet of batteries was a remnant of the last Japanese HTV supply spacecraft that visited the ISS in May 2020.
The HTV carried six space station lithium-ion batteries that were connected to the space station's solar array.
The route chosen for the old batteries was the way the ISS usually disposes of its waste: entering the Earth's atmosphere.
On March 21, 2021 at 2:30 p.m. (CET), the ISS robotic arm released the pallet with the old batteries into space.
At the time, NASA assumed that the battery block, which was approximately four by two meters in size, would burn up “harmlessly” in the atmosphere.
Other experts were more skeptical: astronomer Jonathan McDowell wrote on Twitter (now
“It’s concerning, although on the lower end of concerning,” McDowell said at the time.
The astronomer Phil Plait was also skeptical at the time: “That seems dangerous to me.
It appears to be large and dense, so it is unlikely to burn completely,” he tweeted.
Recently, a European Earth observation satellite burned up in the Earth's atmosphere.
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