NASA’s tool bag orbiting the Earth

If you look up at the sky tonight, you may see an unusual new star.

Along with the stars that have puzzled humans for thousands of years, a stray bag of tools is now orbiting planet Earth. International Space Station (ISS) fell during a spacewalk.

American space agency NASA In a blog post, NASA astronauts Jasmine Mogbeli and Laurel O’Hara were installing solar panels on the station’s exterior on Nov. 1 when the bag slipped from them.

According to space news website EarthSky, the bag reflects so much light that humans can see it from Earth using binoculars, at least until it burns up in Earth’s atmosphere in a few months.

“A tool bag was inadvertently lost during this activity,” NASA says.

Flight controllers spotted the bag using the station’s external cameras, then analyzed its path to see if it posed a threat.

Happily, they determined that the risk of it re-hitting the station was ‘low’, and that the station crew was ‘safe with no further action required.’

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The toolbag is now reportedly listed as space debris #58229 / 1998-067 WC, and is orbiting just beyond the International Space Station.

In a video posted online by Dr. Megan Christian of the British Space Agency, the falling tool bag can be seen passing by the camera and bouncing off a part of the station, and at the same moment, an astronaut. The hand tries to catch it.

Satoshi Furukawa, a Japanese astronaut on the ISS at the time, accidentally photographed Mount Fuji while taking photos from orbit.

‘I think he wanted to see Mount Fuji,’ Miss Mogbeli reportedly told Mission Control the next day.

Miss Mogbeli and Miss O’Hara arrived at the ISS on August 27 with the help of Elon Musk’s private space company SpaceX, making them the rare all-female NASA unit on the station. Both of them had traveled to space for the first time.

Astronauts have dropped a number of items during spacewalks over the past several decades, including extra gloves in 1965, another tool bag in 2008, and a 1.5-meter debris shield being installed on the ISS in 2017.