Space station batteries dumped into ocean two months after disconnection | Tech and Science

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Mar 9, 2024 at 6:08 AM Update: 5 minutes ago

The remains of a discarded battery pack from the ISS space station fell into the Atlantic Ocean on Friday evening. The package consisted of nine batteries, weighed 2,600 kilos and was the size of a car.

The batteries were scheduled to be disconnected from the ISS on January 11. Space agency ESA already predicted that the discarded batteries would return to the atmosphere on Friday.

According to a spokesperson for the German Bundeswehr’s Space Command, the object entered the atmosphere around 8:29 p.m. where it “probably burned up for the most part.” The remaining remains splashed into the sea in an area between the US state of Florida and Guatemala.

The piece of waste also flew over the Netherlands. According to ESA, the risk of being hit by the batteries was very small.

Space debris regularly burns up in the atmosphere. Last month, a European satellite carrying an important Dutch climate instrument, the Global Ozone Monitoring Experiment (GOME), developed by TNO in Delft, sank. This recorded, among other things, the concentrations of ozone in the atmosphere.

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