(ReliableNews.org) – In 2022, NASA reported about 9,000 metric tons of space junk was orbiting Earth. That includes man-made debris that was left in space. Some of that junk recently hit a Florida home.
In March, WINK News reported a piece of metal slammed through a home’s roof in Collier County. The Naples homeowner sent the news organization photos of the object that hit his house. Alejandro Otero said there was a “tremendous sound” and it almost hit his son.
Otero explained that he was on vacation when the man-made cylindrical-shaped object, which only weighed about two pounds, ripped through the roof, ceiling, and floor. He said his son called to tell him what happened, saying it “made a big hole on the floor and on the ceiling.”
The homeowner said that when his son told him what happened, he immediately thought it was a meteorite or something else from space. Otero said that he was “shaking” when he found out what happened and was in “disbelief” that something landed on his home and caused so much damage, but he’s “super grateful that nobody got hurt.”
On April 15, over a month after the incident, NASA finally confirmed the object had, in fact, fallen from space. It was a piece of garbage from the International Space Station. The 1.6-pound piece of metal was debris from a cargo pallet that was accidentally released from the station about three years ago. Scientists at the Kennedy Space Center examined the object and presented their findings.
NASA scientists thought the pallet, which had aging batteries inside, would burn up in space. Instead, the object survived and smashed into the Otero family’s home.
According to a NASA blog post, scientists at the International Space Station will now investigate to determine how the object survived. The space agency said it remained “committed to responsibly operating in low Earth orbit” and trying to mitigate risks to people on Earth when space hardware is released.
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