Tool Bag Lost In Space Meets Fiery End
By Tariq Malik
Managing Editor
posted: 03 August 2009
05:05 pm ET
A tool bag lost by a spacewalking astronaut last year met its fiery demise in Earth’s atmosphere Monday after months circling ever closer to the planet.
The $100,000 tool bag plunged toward Earth and burned up as it re-entered the atmosphere, according to the U.S. Air Force’s Joint Space Operations Center tracking it and more than 19,000 other pieces of space junk in orbit today from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
"Based on its size and composition, we expect the object to completely burn up before hitting the Earth," center officials said in a statement.
The tool bag was lost during a Nov. 18 spacewalk at the International Space Station. In addition to the Joint Operations Space Center, amateur skywatchers also tracked the bag as it silently circled the Earth.
Center officials did not immediately have a specific time and location for the tool bag’s ultimate demise, but a Sunday report by the Web site Universe Today predicted the wayward space satchel would hit the Earth’s atmosphere at about 9:16 a.m. EDT (1316 GMT) over the Pacific Ocean, just west of Mexico.
Lost in space
The tool bag weighed about 30 pounds (14 kg) and was about the size of a small backpack. It contained grease guns, trash bags and a scraper tool.
Former NASA astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper lost the bag during a November spacewalk to repair a balky solar array joint on the International Space Station as part of NASA’s STS-126 shuttle mission. A grease gun leaked inside the bag, which apparently wasn’t secured properly, and it drifted free while Stefanyshyn-Piper was trying to clean up the mess.
"There was that split second thinking that, maybe I can go jump for it and grab it. Then I realized that it would just make everything worse and then we’d have two floating objects, one of which would be me," Stefanyshyn-Piper said in a televised Nov. 19 interview from space the day after losing the bag. "So the best thing to do was just to let it go."
Stefanyshyn-Piper, an active captain in the U.S. Navy, retired from NASA’s astronaut corps last month to return to her Navy duties.
Hmm ! really?