Recently, we shared with you that astronauts dropped their toolbox during a spacewalk and got lost in space. Fortunately, a newly shared image showed that the toolbox appeared before anything bad happened, such as colliding with the satellite. The lost astronaut toolbox appears as a small white speck in the resulting image.
The Virtual Telescope Project released an in-orbit image of the toolbox lost by spacewalking astronauts on November 1. The image was captured on Wednesday using a single 2-second exposure by one of the facility’s robotic telescopes in Manciano, Italy.
The telescope tracked and detected the bag as it orbited the Earth at speeds reaching 28,000 kilometers per hour. In the image, the bag appears as a lonely dot in the vast void of space, surrounded only by faint streaks of light from a few surrounding stars.
https://twitter.com/astro_meganne/status/1721297966999236802
The toolbox was lost and accidentally dragged out of reach during a spacewalk by Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara outside the International Space Station.
However, like the International Space Station, it currently orbits the Earth and rotates at a similar speed. The orbiting bag will likely remain in orbit for several months before losing altitude and disintegrating in Earth’s atmosphere. It also does not pose a threat to the International Space Station or astronauts in its current orbit.
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