A 2.9-ton cargo pallet used for a battery modernization mission aboard the International Space Station (ISS) is flying toward Earth. It will soon re-enter the planet’s atmosphere, Gizmodo reports.
The pallet was ejected from the ISS in 2021 and is expected to disintegrate in the atmosphere. However, Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell notes that the pallet “will not burn up completely upon reentry – about half a ton of fragments will likely fall to the Earth’s surface.”
This is the heaviest piece of space debris from the ISS that has ever fallen to our planet. According to McDowell, the expected reentry time is between the afternoon of March 8 and the morning of March 9. The exact time is unknown.
According to NASA spokesperson Leah Cheshire in March 2021, the pallet “was the largest object (by weight) ever jettisoned from the International Space Station, weighing 2.9 tons. This was more than double the mass of the early ammonia maintenance system tank jettisoned during Clay Anderson’s 2007 spacewalk.”
The pallet’s journey began in 2020, when it was delivered to the ISS by a Japanese cargo ship. It was part of a mission in which astronauts had to replace old nickel-hydrogen batteries with new, more efficient lithium-ion batteries. This upgrade was part of a larger effort that culminated in the February 1, 2021 spacewalk by astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover.
During the mission, the astronauts made 14 spacewalks. Over the course of six years, 48 nickel-hydrogen batteries were replaced with 24 lithium-ion batteries.
But the uncontrolled entry of the pallet into the atmosphere was not part of the original plan. It became necessary after the mission schedule was disrupted by the failed launch of the Soyuz rocket in 2018. This caused a disruption in the schedule for the disposal of unnecessary equipment. Usually, old batteries are placed inside cargo ships and then dumped directly into the atmosphere, where they are completely burned.
However, at the end of 2018, the cargo ship took off without this battery tray due to the rescheduling of the spacewalk.
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