The Source of this Floor Damage? Junk from Outer Space

This image from NASA shows the recovered object, right, next to an intact stanchion, left.Here's a situation where the homeowner saying they had no idea where the floor damage came from was true: Alejandro Otero wasn't home when an unidentified object fell through the roof and ceiling of his Naples, Fla., home and lodged into a hole it created in his floor. His 19-year-old son, two rooms away and home alone, had to call and tell him about the startlingly loud crash.

"He wasn't even sure how to tell me what happened and we had to look and listen to the security cameras to try to piece together what caused the loud crashing noise," Otero told news outlets. "It looked like it caused the whole house to shake, so we weren't sure if there had been an earthquake or what. When he saw the hole coming through the house, he realized something fell through." 

The object, the size of a soda can, turned out to be a piece of space junk—but not just any space junk. It was from NASA support equipment used to mount International Space Station batteries on a cargo pallet. The stanchion was one piece amid 5,800 pounds of hardwood released from the space station in March 2021, according to NASA.

"The hardware was expected to fully burn up during entry through Earth’s atmosphere on March 8, 2024," a statement from NASA said. "However, a piece of hardware survived re-entry and impacted a home in Naples, Florida. NASA collected the item in cooperation with the homeowner and analyzed the object at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida."