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.
A look
at junk in space
Space
debris, in general, has been a growing concern for NASA and other
spaceflight operators due to the unprecedented crash of a Russian and American
satellite earlier this year. The Feb. 10 smashup in space created two new large
clouds of debris that have been continuously tracked by the Department of
Defense's Space Surveillance Network.
The network
is currently tracking more than 19,000 pieces of space junk larger than four
inches (10 cm) across, but an estimated 300,000 total objects bigger than a
half-inch (1 cm) are thought to be in Earth orbit today, space debris officials
have said.
Stefanyshyn-Piper's
bag and other tools lost by astronauts in the past have typically posed little
risk of coming back and hitting spacecraft in orbit. The tool bag, for example,
circled Earth for more than eight months before finally destroying itself in
Earth's atmosphere.
If a piece
of space debris is expected to come close to satellites or manned spacecraft
like NASA's shuttles or the International Space Station, the vehicles can be
moved ahead of time given enough advanced notice.
The space
station's most recent brush with a piece of space junk came on July 17, just
hours after the space shuttle Endeavour arrived with a crew of seven astronauts
during NASA's STS-127 mission. Astronauts fired Endeavour's thrusters to
nudge the space station and move it clear of a piece of orbital debris that
would have come within its safety perimeter, NASA officials said.
Endeavour's
seven-astronaut crew landed in Florida Friday to end a successful 16-day
mission that replaced a member of the station's crew, as well as delivered a new
experiment porch and spare parts for the orbiting laboratory.
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