The likelihood of a piece of space debris hitting your home is statistically extremely low. Not zero, though, as Alejandro Otero of Naples, Florida, found out in March when an unknown piece of debris ripped through the roof of his home and made its way through two stories.

Otero’s son was at home during the strange incident, but luckily he was uninjured and called his father afterwards to alert him, This was reported in WINK News On time.

But what was this mysterious object that fell from the sky? As it turned out, it was a piece of hardware thrown from the International Space Station back in 2021, NASA has now confirmed.

Alejandro Otero delivered the object to NASA, which examined it closely at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida:

“As part of the analysis, NASA completed an assessment of the object’s dimensions and properties compared to published hardware and performed a materials analysis. Based on the examination, the agency determined that the debris was a stand from NASA’s flight support equipment used to mount the batteries on the payload bay. The object is made of the Inconel metal alloy, weighs 1.6 pounds, is 4 inches tall and 1.6 inches in diameter.

The payload bay mentioned above contained obsolete nickel hydride batteries from the space station. They were released from the orbital outpost by the station’s robotic arm and were expected to burn up completely during re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Obviously, in the end this was not the case.

“NASA experts use engineering models to estimate how objects heat up and break up during re-entry into the atmosphere. These models require detailed input parameters and are regularly updated when debris is found to have survived atmospheric entry to the ground,” NASA explained and announced that the ISS will conduct a detailed investigation of the fragmentation and re-entry analysis.

Based on the results, if necessary, NASA will update its models and analyzes to ensure that so-called space junk is disposed of safely in the future.