Ten U.S. and 2 United Arab Emirates astronauts have just completed 2 years of training NASA confirmed on Monday that an object that crashed into a Naples, Florida, home last month was a piece of hardware from the International Space Station that was supposed to burn up on re-entry before reaching the surface of Earth. Alejandro Otero said a piece of equipment from the International Space Station hit his Naples home, posting photos of the object on X in response to an astronomer who was tracking where and when the equipment would enter the Earth's atmosphere. Otero told the astronomer it looked like one of the pieces had missed Fort Myers, and landed inside his home. "Tore through the roof and went thru 2 floors," he posted on X, adding that it almost hit his son. FLORIDA MAN SAYS SPACE OBJECT CRASHED INTO HIS HOUSE.

On March 8, a piece of space debris plunged through a roof in Naples, FL, ripped through two floors and (fortunately) missed the son of homeowner Alejandro Otero. On Tuesday, NASA confirmed the results of its analysis of the incident. As suspected, it's a piece of equipment dumped from the International Space Station (ISS) three years ago. NASA's investigation of the object at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral confirmed it was a piece of the EP-9 support equipment used to mount batteries onto a cargo pallet, which the ISS' robotic arm dropped on March 11, 2021. The haul, made up of discarded nickel-hydrogen batteries, was expected to orbit Earth between two to four years (it split the difference, lasting almost exactly three) "before burning up harmlessly in the atmosphere," as NASA predicted at the time.

Roughly eight months after it fell silent during a planet-wide Martian dust storm, and just weeks after celebrating its 15th anniversary on the red planet, NASA is finally saying goodbye to the Opportunity rover. The space agency has made hundreds of attempts to contact the rover since it powered down back in June, when dark skies prevented its solar battery from charging. In a last-ditch effort, NASA sent out a final set of commands on Tuesday in hopes it might finally respond. But once again, their calls were met only with silence. NASA confirmed the grim news in a press conference Wednesday afternoon, where it officially bade farewell to the long-running Mars exploration mission. With the death of the Opportunity rover also comes the end of NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers program, which launched from Cape Canaveral in July 2003 with the twin robots, Spirit and Opportunity.