Two NASA astronauts dropped a tool bag with the equipment still inside it while on a spacewalk earlier this month, leaving it to float in the void before it burns up next year.
Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara were conducting the first all-female spacewalk outside the International Space Station on Nov. 2 when they dropped the bag, Space.com reported.
The spacewalk took a total of six hours and 42 minutes as Moghbeli and O’Hara worked on the ISS’s solar arrays, which track the sun and help power the station, according to NASA.
While the pair let the tools slip, they were no longer required for the remainder of the spacewalk, the space agency shared.
“Mission Control analyzed the bag’s trajectory and determined that risk of recontacting the station is low and that the onboard crew and space station are safe with no action required,” NASA said.
Now the tool bag is “inadvertently lost,” NASA said in a blog post. Flight controllers were able to snap a picture of the bag using the ISS’s external cameras.
The bag, while expensive, is also very bright, according to EarthSky, being just slightly less bright than Uranus, with a visual magnitude of around 6+. This means they can be seen with a pair of binoculars but not the naked eye.
The website shared that the bag will remain in orbit for a few months before it inevitably disintegrates into Earth’s atmosphere. EarthSky says the bag will enter the Earth’s atmosphere around March 2024.
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