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CAP CANAVERAL — NASA astronauts Jasmine Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara performed their first spacewalk this month, leaving their tool bags floating in space.
According to the space agency, the pair completed the maintenance work outside the International Space Station in 6 hours and 42 minutes.
During the November 1 spacewalk, Mogbeli and O’Hara completed work on the station’s solar array that tracks the sun, but ran out of time to remove and stow the communications electronics box. Leaving this mission to a future spacewalk, the pair instead conducted an assessment of how the mission could be carried out.
NASA said the tool bag slipped and was “lost” during the hours-long mission, and flight controllers found it using the station’s external cameras. Fortunately, no tools were required for the rest of the work.
“Mission control analyzed the bag’s trajectory and determined that the risk of re-contacting the station is low, the crew and the space station are safe, and no action is necessary,” NASA said on its official blog.
How to see the tool bag from Earth
According to the website EarthSky, which tracks space events, the toolbag is currently orbiting Earth ahead of the ISS and will be seen from Earth with binoculars in the coming months before disintegrating in Earth’s atmosphere. There is a possibility that it will be discovered.
This isn’t the first time astronauts have lost equipment in space. In 2008, Heide’s Stefan Herring’s Piper was cleaning and lubricating the gear on his malfunctioning rotary joint when the bag floated away. During the 2006 spacewalk, astronauts Piers Sellers and Michael Fossum lost a 14-inch spatula while testing a repair method for the space shuttle.
Space debris and junk are man-made materials that, like these objects, orbit around the Earth, but are no longer functional. It can be anything from small chips of paint to discarded parts during a rocket launch.
In September 2023, the European Space Agency estimated that 35,290 objects have been tracked and cataloged by various space surveillance networks, and the total mass of objects orbiting the Earth amounts to more than 11,000 tons.