When it comes to astronomy targets, some are less celestial than others. Floating through the space around Earth, a tool bag has now joined stars, planets, nebulas, and galaxies as a surprising target for skywatchers. This tool bag slipped from the grasp of NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O’Hara on Nov. 2, 2023, as they were conducting a spacewalk outside of the International Space Station (ISS).
Orbiting our planet just ahead of the ISS, the tool bag has a visual magnitude of around 6, slightly less bright than the ice giant Uranus. While too dim to be visible to the unaided eye, skywatchers should be able to pick it up with binoculars.
To catch a glimpse of the tool bag, find out when you can spot the space station over the next few months and look for the bag floating two to four minutes ahead of the station before it eventually disintegrates at an altitude of around 70 miles over Earth.
According to European Space Agency (ESA) reserve astronaut Meganne Christian, the tool bag was last sighted by Crew-7 astronaut Satoshi Furukawa as it floated high above Mount Fuji. Harvard Center for Astrophysics (CfA) astronomer Jonathan McDowell added that the bag is circling Earth in a roughly 258 by 258 mile orbit and has been given its own categorization in the U.S. space force cataloging system for artificial objects in orbit.
Joining a vast array of space junk in orbit around Earth, the tool bag isn’t the first of its kind to reach orbit. This incident is reminiscent of the 2008 loss of another tool bag in orbit during a spacewalk by NASA astronaut Heide Stefanyshyn-Piper.
Ultimately, the tool bag adds to the variety of unusual objects to find their way into Earth’s orbit. However, it’s not quite as strange as the story of the humble spatula lost by NASA astronaut Piers Sellers while spreading heat-shield repair slime during a space shuttle flight in 2006.
