NASA has confirmed that the roughly 2-pound part of a jettisoned pallet of used batteries that crashed through the roof and two floors of a Florida man’s house last month originated on the International Space Station.

The space administration stated in a blog post on 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.” NASA said that the total mass of the items released from the space station was around 5,800 pounds, according to a recent article by Gabe Hauari of Naples Daily News.

According to NASA, the hardware is projected to “fully burn up during entry through Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, 2024.” However, one component of the gear “survived re-entry” and fell into a property in Naples, Florida.

Space trash smashes into a Naples home.
Alejandro Otero was not at his Naples home on March 8, but he said his son was two rooms away from the impact. The crash, which was captured on his Nest home security camera at 2:34 p.m., coincides with the time the U.S. Space Command detected the entry of some space debris from the ISS, according to Ars Technica.

“Something ripped through the house and then made a big hole on the floor and ceiling,” Otero told WINK News, which first reported the story. “When we heard that, we were like, impossible, and then immediately I thought a meteorite.”

NASA investigates and analyzes re-entry.
NASA stated that it collaborated with the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to recover the item and, after investigating it, discovered that the debris was “stanchion from the NASA flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.”

NASA said the item is comprised of the metal alloy Inconel and weighs 1.6 pounds. It is four inches tall and 1.6 inches in diameter.

“The International Space Station will perform a detailed investigation of the jettison and re-entry analysis to determine the cause of the debris survival and to update modeling and analysis, as needed,” the space agency said in a blog post.

This article originally appeared on Naples Daily News

The post NASA identifies space junk that hit a Naples home last month. appeared first on Naples News Now.