2023-11-14 16:56:08
If you want to see floating tools, you should take a look at the night sky with binoculars soon.
A bag of instruments is currently orbiting Earth and experts say it is bright enough to be seen from Earth. The exceptional phenomenon in space goes back to an external mission by astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara on the International Space Station ISS on November 1st.
During the almost seven hours of work on the solar sails, among other things, “a tool bag was accidentally lost,” as the US space agency Nasa wrote. “The tools were not needed for the remainder of the spacewalk. Mission Control analyzed the bag’s trajectory and determined that the risk of re-contact with the station was low.” NASA thus left the bag into space.
A little later, space nerds like the operators of the site “earthsky.org” pointed out that you can see the object with binoculars – as long as you know where the ISS is currently located. The bag orbits the earth a few minutes before the space station and slowly but steadily loses altitude 400 kilometers above the earth. Eventually, according to the forecast, it will crash into the earth’s atmosphere and burn up.
The NASA tools are not the only objects left by humans in Earth’s orbit. The European space agency Esa assumes there are over 36,000 objects measuring over 10 centimeters. Many of the objects come from previous missions and are parts of rockets or satellites. And another tool bag has also been lost: In 2008, a bag containing, among other things, presses and scrapers floated away during an ISS external mission.
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