NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara, who took a long spacewalk on November 1, dropped a bag of tools that was apparently beyond recovery.
• Also read: NASA is cutting off communication with its robots on Mars
• Also read: Note to astronomy enthusiasts: Saturn’s rings will disappear in 2025
According to the space agency, the duo had to perform maintenance work outside the International Space Station (ISS) in six hours and 42 minutes.
AFP
The two astronauts managed to complete work on the station’s solar panels, but they ran out of time to remove and put away an electronic communications box.
During their mission, a tool bag slipped out of their hands and was “lost,” NASA said.
Flight controllers discovered it using the ISS’s external cameras. Fortunately, these tools were not needed for the remaining tasks.
According to their analysis, the bag was unlikely to return to the space station, there was no risk of collision and there was nothing that could be done, CNN reports.
According to EarthSky, a website that tracks cosmic events, the toolkit is currently orbiting Earth in front of the ISS and could potentially be spotted with binoculars from Earth in the next few months until it decays in our planet’s atmosphere.
This isn’t the first time an astronaut has lost tools in space.
In 2008, Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper’s bag blew up while she was cleaning and lubricating the gears of a broken swivel joint.
MEGA/IF
During a spacewalk in 2006, astronauts Piers Sellers and Michael Fossum lost a 14-inch spatula while testing a method to repair the space shuttle.
In September 2023, the European Space Agency estimated that 35,290 objects had been tracked and cataloged by the various space surveillance networks, with the total mass of objects orbiting Earth exceeding 11,000 tons.