When a Florida family filed a claim against NASA over "space junk" that fell through their roof earlier this year, it launched a potentially precedent-setting question: Who is liable when debris ...

Very rarely, they have caused damage or minor injury, but experts say a growing amount of junk in space means those occurrences may happen more frequently in the future. So who should pay in a ...

The chance of damage to property, on the other hand, is higher. It could be as high as 1% for any given re-entry of the Long March 5B. Also, the overall risk posed by space debris will increase ...

When they do succumb to gravity, the results can be unpredictable, and space debris damage can literally occur anywhere. If that gives you chills, take comfort in the fact that the sheer amount of ...

And since no damage was done, the U.S. — the country ... There have also been incidents involving space junk from China. In 2007, a plane narrowly avoided being hit by Russian space debris.

Space debris is no exception ... small to be detected by current tracking systems — can cause huge amounts of damage owing to the sheer velocity at which they travel. The ISS relies on ballistic ...

The battery pallet as it was released from the ISS in 2021. Photo: NASA On March 8, a small, cylinder-shaped object fell from the skies and crashed through the roof of a family home in Naples ...

Given the lack of definition, legal disputes often hinge on whether a piece of debris qualifies as a “space object” under the Convention for International Liability for Damage Caused by Space ...

And when these objects unintentionally collide, they explode into thousands of debris fragments that can seriously damage operational spacecraft. With a booming commercial space industry that has ...

but a chip that flies into a spacecraft at 17,500 mph can severely damage or even destroy the vessel. It's happened to satellites, and many objects have run afoul of an errant piece of space junk.