The telescope finds a bag lost by International Space Station astronauts

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The bag that fell from the International Space Station can be seen using binoculars. But only for a few months

Igor Nishikori

3 hours ago

The instrument bag that fell from the International Space Station (ISS) at the beginning of November was observed on Wednesday (15) by a telescope installed in the city of Manciano, Italy. The capture was done by an automated unit that used a two-second exposure to produce the image, according to the founder Virtual telescope projectAstronomer Gianluca Masi.

This case occurred on November 1, when astronauts Yasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara were changing a solar panel on the International Space Station. At some point, a tool bag ended up falling from the space station toward Earth. The North American Space Agency (NASA) analyzed the object’s path and concluded that there was no danger to the crew, and left the situation at that.

So the toolbag would have to float on the planet for a few months until it was pulled by Earth’s gravity and burned by the force of returning to the atmosphere. While this does not happen, it is possible to spot the bag using binoculars or simple telescopes, depending on the site. Space.com website.

To see it, you have to locate the International Space Station in the sky. Your bag should show up two to four minutes before the station. However, the International Space Station is not always visible, which is why NASA recently I launched the application Which lets you know when the space station will be visible in your city.

Other cases

Fortunately, the chaos did not cause serious consequences, as the tools were no longer necessary for the task. The greatest danger was the possibility of a fragment colliding with the International Space Station, which is traveling at a speed of 28 thousand kilometers per hour.

This is not the first case in which instruments have actually fallen from space. In 2008, astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper was also repairing a solar panel when a bag containing space station instruments went missing. Two years earlier, astronaut Pierce Sellers dropped a putty knife while repairing a heat shield aboard the space shuttle Discovery.