A piece of metal that tore through a Florida home last month was space junk from the International Space Station, according to NASA.
The agency confirmed Monday that the 1.6-pound object was debris from a cargo pallet that had been intentionally released from the space station three years ago.
The pallet, packed with aging batteries, was supposed to burn up harmlessly in Earth’s atmosphere, but a piece survived — the piece that smashed into a house in Naples, Florida, on March 8.
WINK News, a CBS News affiliate in southwestern Florida, first reported the incident. Naples resident Alejandro Otero told the outlet that the object crashed through the roof and two floors of his home. Otero was not home at the time, he told WINK News, but the metal object nearly hit his son, who was two rooms away.
Otero did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a blog post about the incident, NASA said it had analyzed the object at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and confirmed that it was part of the equipment used to mount the batteries on the cargo pallet.
