NASA confirms mystery object that crashed through roof of Naples home came from space station

Reporter: Annalise Iraola
Published: Updated:
NASA
An object falls from the sky and crashes through a home in Naples. CREDIT: WINK News

NASA confirmed Monday that a mystery object that crashed through the roof of a Florida home last month was a chunk of space junk from equipment discarded at the International Space Station.

The cylindrical object that tore through the home in Naples on March 8 was subsequently taken to the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral for analysis.

The space agency said it was a metal support used to mount old batteries on a cargo pallet for disposal. The pallet was jettisoned from the space station in 2021, and the load was expected to eventually fully burn up on entry into Earth’s atmosphere, but one piece survived.

Homeowner Alejandro Otero told television station us at the time that he was on vacation when his son told him what had happened. Otero came home early to check on the house, finding the object had ripped through his ceiling and torn up the flooring.

“I was shaking. I was completely in disbelief. What are the chances of something landing on my house with such force to cause so much damage,” Otero said. “I’m super grateful that nobody got hurt.”

The chunk of metal weighed 1.6 pounds (0.7 kilograms) and was 4 inches (10 centimeters) tall and roughly 1 1/2 inches (4 centimeters) wide.

“So many people thought, well, that’s from an airplane. It could have been funded on a meteorite and it could have been true, but after pulling it out and looking at it and observing it and I knew it was something that must have crossed the atmosphere,” said Otero.

WINK News spoke with Otero in March about the strange object that came crashing through his roof.

“I was shaking, I was completely in disbelief. What are the chances of something landing on my house with such force to cause so much damage,” asked Otero. “I’m super grateful that nobody got hurt.”

After collecting and analyzing the object, NASA confirmed the piece of space junk was from the International Space Station Cargo Pallet that’s been aimlessly floating in space since 2021.

“I was happy to be right. Because then it clears roll out, he makes sure. Now we know where it came from,” said Otero. “So it came from the International Space Station, like I suspected, so that’s good to know,” said Otero.

In a post, NASA said it remains committed to mitigating as much risk as possible to protect people on Earth when space hardware is released. Click here to read the NASA blog post.

WINK News contributed to this article.

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