Shock moment Nasa astronauts DROP £80,000 toolkit in space – and bag can now be seen from Earth orbiting at 17,500mph
THIS is the shocking moment NASA astronauts accidentally drop a toolkit worth £80,000 in space.
Astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara were carrying out repairs on the exterior of the International Space Station when their tool bag floated off into space.
The moment of the blunder was captured live in a video stream during a nearly seven-hour spacewalk on 1 November.
Both the astronauts were working to reconfigure the ethernet cable on the ISS and replacing the trundle bearing assembly when suddenly they lost sight of the bag.
And now the toolkit has quite literally been all around the world – at about 17,000mph – since astronauts lost grip on them.
Just days after being lost, the bag was pictured by Japanese ISS resident, Satoshi Furukawa, as he flew over Mount Fuji.
The kit is now being monitored by the US Space Force as a new orbital object – or space debris.
While the bag of tools is quite small, it is highly reflective – with a visual magnitude of around 6.
This makes it just slightly dimmer than Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun.
And this means the crew lock bag can be picked up by a pair of binoculars of telescopes from the Earth’s surface.
Brits could spot it swinging around in Earth’s orbit.
It was visible in parts of the UK on November 21, including south Wales, Cotswolds, and Oxfordshire in the early evening.
It was also expected to beeline across North London and over the East Coast later that evening.
According to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard Centre for Astrophysics, the bag isn’t in a stable orbit – so it won’t be visible to humans forever.
It is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in a few months, and burn up completely.