With the increasing number of satellites and spacecraft floating in and outside the Earth’s atmosphere, space waste has become another new danger that is added to the dangers that threaten human safety on the surface of the Earth.
This image shows a mysterious piece of metal space debris that has fallen near a luxury camping resort in the mountains west of Asheville, North Carolina. According to NASA, the metal piece is from a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft capsule that recently re-entered Earth’s atmosphere after a trip to the International Space Station, making it another piece of space junk that has been falling to Earth on the rise lately. “NASA is not aware of any structural damage or injuries resulting from this piece breaking away,” the agency said in a statement. Space debris is equipment that humans have abandoned in space, and can include things like defunct satellites or spacecraft that have lost their usefulness.
In recent months, a Florida family has sued NASA after equipment used on one of the agency’s space missions fell onto their home. The object pictured here fell on a hiking trail at a North Carolina mountain resort and could have landed anywhere in the vast area without anyone noticing, but a member of the resort’s landscaping crew found the roughly 100-pound object, which was about 4 feet by 4 feet in size. It was immediately clear to the landscaper that such an object could only have fallen from the sky, given its size and remote location, which begs the question: How disastrous would the consequences have been if the space debris had fallen in a human-inhabited area?
(Photo courtesy of The New York Times)
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