As of: April 4, 2024, 2:04 p.m
By: Tanja Banner
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Space debris could have hit Germany, but it crashed into the Gulf of Mexico. But part of it apparently hit a house. NASA is investigating the incident.
Naples - There was great excitement in Germany on March 8th: a pallet of discarded batteries from the International Space Station (ISS) could potentially crash in Germany, and authorities even sent warning messages via the Nina and Katwarn apps. But the crash over Germany did not occur. According to official information from the US Space Force, the space debris fell into the Gulf of Mexico at 7:29 p.m. (UTC). “A few minutes later and it would have been Ft. Met Myers,” satellite expert Jonathan McDowell wrote on X (formerly Twitter) at the time.
But apparently not all pieces of space debris burned up safely or ended up in the sea. A few days later, Alejandro Otero published pictures on X of an object that he said fell into his home in Naples (US state of Florida). He wrote: “Break through the roof and go through two floors. Almost hit my son.” The topic is only now picking up steam, almost three weeks after the original post.
The battery pack that the ISS dropped in March 2021 is falling towards Earth. (Archive image) © imago images/ZUMA Wire/Nasa
Object hits house in Florida – “I thought it might have come from outer space”
Otero tells Fox News
about
his discovery: "We cut our trip short to get home as quickly as possible because we really didn't know what had happened at the time and it was quite a shock!" He then describes the object that hit his house: “It didn’t look like anything I’d ever seen before. It looked like it had been burned and scraped, and it was a heavy piece for its size. I thought it might have come from outer space.”
Otero has very impressive evidence that the part that landed in his house could be related to space debris: a recording from his security camera does not show the crash, but it did record the noises. Otero read Friday, March 8, 2024 at 2:34 a.m. as the time stamp. “That's 7:34 p.m. UTC, which is very consistent with the Space Force's estimate of reentry over the Gulf at 7:20 p.m. UTC,” notes expert McDowell on Re-entry of the EP-9 battery range.”
Space debris breaks through roof of house in Florida – NASA launches investigation
The US space agency Nasa can also apparently imagine that it was part of the space junk that was dropped from the ISS about two years ago, only to burn up in the Earth's atmosphere in March 2024.
Fox News
quotes Nasa spokeswoman Jennifer Dooren in this context: “Nasa, in collaboration with the homeowner, collected an object on March 28th and will analyze it as quickly as possible at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to determine its origin After the analysis has been completed, further information will be published.
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Otero told
Fox News
that his insurance would cover the damage. In general, liability for damage caused by space debris is regulated in the United Nations Outer Space Treaty: the country that owns the space debris must pay for the damage. But with the battery pack from the ISS, things could be a little more complicated: As
Ars Technica
reports, the batteries belonged to NASA, but they were mounted on a structure that was launched into space by the Japanese space agency Jaxa.
The person concerned wants to discuss responsible space travel
Otero himself sees the matter very rationally after the initial shock: “This is such an astonishing event that we all have to stop and think about the future,” said the person concerned on
Fox News
. “We have a good starting point for a discussion about how to approach space travel responsibly, because this near miss is a warning sign for the space community.”
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