A Giant Piece of Space Station Trash Will Crash to Earth This Weekend

The heaviest-ever piece of ISS space trash is set for uncontrolled reentry.

A 2.9-ton cargo pallet, once used for a critical battery upgrade mission on the International Space Station , is now approaching the end of its journey and is expected to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in the coming days. The pallet, tossed from the ISS in March 2021 by the trusty Canadarm2, is facing imminent destruction in Earth’s atmosphere three years after serving its purpose in a major battery replacement project on the station.

In May 2020, a Japanese cargo ship docked at the ISS, delivering the SUV-sized equipment pallet to assist astronauts in replacing the old nickel-hydrogen batteries with new, more efficient lithium-ion batteries. This upgrade was a part of a larger effort, which concluded with a spacewalk on February 1, 2021, by astronauts Mike Hopkins and Victor Glover.

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