The International Space Station got a little lighter last week.
The orbital laboratory dumped a pallet of 2.9-ton (2.6-ton) used batteries on Thursday morning (March 11) – the most massive object it has ever encountered, NASA spokeswoman Leah Cheshier told Gizmodo .
The space debris is expected to return to Earth in two to four years, agency officials wrote in an update last week. According to the update, the palette will burn “harmlessly into the atmosphere”, but not everyone is convinced that this is the case.
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“It seems to me (haha, a pun given the circumstances) as dangerous. It looks big and dense, so unlikely that it will burn up completely,” said astronomer and author Phil Plait, whose ‘Bad Astronomy’ blog on Syfy Wire appears, posted on Twitter Thursday.
“Yes. On the other hand, for example, Tiangong-1 was 7500 kg [kilograms], much larger. But I would say given how dense EP9 is, it goes, even if it’s at the bottom of, ” answered astronomer and satellite Jonathan McDowell, based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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Tiangong-1 was China’s first prototype space station, which housed astronaut teams in 2012 and 2013. The school bus’s vessels finally crashed across the South Pacific in April 2018.
EP9, the abbreviation for ‘Exposed Pallet 9’, is the object that was recently examined. EP9 arrived at the station last year on a Japanese H-II transfer vehicle (HTV) as part of an effort to replace the laboratory’s old nickel-hydrogen batteries with new lithium-ion batteries – an extensive process for which a number of spaces past five years.
Previously, the old batteries were packaged in the disposable HTV, which carried them to their downfall in the Earth’s atmosphere. But the failure of a Soyuz rocket with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin in October 2018 disrupted this pattern, Spaceflight Now reports. (The Hague and Ovchinin eventually landed safely, thanks to their Soyuz capsule’s launch system.) And EP9 came on the ninth and final HTV, meaning it was left without a judgment day ride.
So space station managers decided to customize the pallet packed with batteries. On Thursday morning, ground controllers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston ordered the laboratory’s 17.7-meter-long robotic arm to release EP9 into orbit, NASA officials wrote in the update.
The SUV size palette has a lot of space junk industry up there. According to the European Space Agency, researchers estimate that the Earth’s orbit is cluttered with about 34,000 debris objects at least 10 centimeters wide and 128 million pieces that are 1 millimeter wide or larger.
Mike Wall is the author of “Out there“(Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom or Facebook.