The International Space Station’s Earth-impacting battery may also pass over the Netherlands today. The chance of danger is small, but a light show or sonic boom is possible.

“It’s amazing when it rains over our areas,” says satellite expert Marco Langbroek. “The object breaks into pieces at 50 to 80 kilometers above sea level and then burns up into a series of slowly falling fragments.”

Langbroek says the scene resembles a swarm of hundreds of meteors. “But the chance that we will see something here is not great, 1% or less.”

Langbroek actually picked up the object yesterday:

It is a battery the size of a passenger car, weighing 2,600 kilograms and measuring 12 cubic metres. It was rejected by the International Space Station in 2021 and is now returning to the atmosphere without control. It is the largest object ever to return to Earth from the International Space Station.

The European Space Agency calculated that the battery will enter the atmosphere over North America within twenty hours, around seven in the evening. The exact time and location of reaching Earth depends on the delay you experience due to the atmosphere.

Experts follow the object closely: the object’s path is tracked using radar, among other things. If necessary, warnings will follow. “Forecasts are always wildly inaccurate until about an hour in advance,” Langbroek explains. “But if it’s over Holland around that time, I’ll go and see if I can’t see anything.”

The German Disaster Agency provided detailed information about space debris Maybe three times Crosses German airspace. In the middle of those three regions around 7:20 p.m., parts of the Netherlands are also in the path, such as part of the North Sea coast, Gelderland, northern Limburg and Brabant.

Langbroek believes that a private press release like that of the Germans is a bit exaggerated, given the low potential for danger. “It is not a small object, but objects of this size land every month. Perhaps it has been taken into account that this time it is not a rocket phase, but something more solid. There may be more of that, but then I still do not understand why you are creating such a panic.” “

NASA notes that space debris is falling to Earth uncontrollably often, at a rate of once a day over the past 50 years. What doesn’t burn often ends up in the ocean or in uninhabited areas. He never killed anyone.