NASA confirms origin of space junk that hit Florida home

NASA has confirmed that a nearly 2-pound chunk of a jettisoned pallet of used batteries that crashed through the roof and two floors of a Florida man’s house last month came from the International Space Station.

The space administration said in a blog post Monday that in March 2021, ground controllers used the International Space Station’s robotic arm to “release a cargo pallet containing aging nickel hydride batteries from the space station following the delivery and installation of new lithium-ion batteries as part of power upgrades on the orbital outpost.” The total mass of the hardware released was about 5,800 pounds, NASA said.

According to NASA, the hardware was expected to “fully burn up during entry through Earth’s atmosphere on March 8.” But a piece of the hardware “survived re-entry.”

Alejandro Otero wasn’t in his home March 8, but said his son was two rooms away from the impact. The crash, which could be heard at 2:34 p.m. in his Nest home security camera footage, coincides with the time the U.S. Space Command noted the entry of some space debris from the ISS, the technology publication Ars Technica reported.

“Something ripped through the house and then made a big hole on the floor and on the ceiling,” Otero told WINK News. “When we heard that, we were like, ‘Impossible,’ and then I thought a meteorite.”

NASA said the debris was “stanchion from the NASA flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.”

“The International Space Station will perform a detailed investigation of the jettison and re-entry analysis to determine the cause of the debris surviva,” NASA said in the blog post.