The space agency tossed a massive pallet of old batteries from the ISS, and a piece of it fell through a family’s roof.
A family from Florida filed a claim against NASA for a small piece of trash that the space agency had tossed from the International Space Station (ISS), which ended up in their home.
Earlier this year, a two-pound cylindrical-shaped object crashed through the roof of a family home in Naples, Florida, creating a hole in the ceiling and the floor. The incident coincided with the reentry of a massive pallet of old batteries from the ISS, which plummeted through the atmosphere on the same day over the Gulf of Mexico, ultimately heading toward southwest Florida.
The homeowner reported the incident and NASA retrieved the object for analysis. In April, the space agency confirmed that, upon studying the object’s dimensions and features, it was indeed a fragment from the flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.
“Space debris is a real and serious issue because of the increase in space traffic in recent years,” Mica Nguyen Worthy, the family’s attorney, said in a statement.