NASA Astronauts Lose Tool Bag in Orbit – Resembling Uranus from Earth

On November 2 of this year, NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O'Hara lost a tool bag during a spacewalk, and it now appears like Uranus when viewed from Earth, according to Space.com.

The bag's location can be tracked using an app designed to locate the International Space Station (ISS) in the sky. Currently, it is flying 2–4 minutes ahead of the space station and can even be seen from Earth with powerful binoculars. The bag may burn up in the atmosphere when it descends to a height of approximately 110 kilometers above Earth.

Harvard Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell reported that the bag is orbiting Earth at an altitude of approximately 415–416 kilometers. McDowell also explained that the bag has been assigned its own category in the U.S. Space Force's catalog for artificial objects in orbit, with the official designation 58229/1998–067WC.

This tool bag has joined the vast amount of space debris in orbit around Earth – ranging from shuttle fragments and broken satellites to tools used by astronauts. It's not even the first tool bag to reach orbit; in 2008, NASA astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper lost control of another tool bag while attempting to repair a malfunctioning mechanism on the ISS, and it orbited our planet.

However, a tool bag is not the strangest object to end up in Earth's orbit. One of the leading contenders for that title is a common kitchen spatula that the late NASA astronaut Piers Sellers lost while using it to apply repair fluid to the heat shield during the Discovery STS-121 shuttle flight in 2006.

In other news, scientists have successfully identified ancient riverbeds on Mars by combining images taken by the Curiosity rover, sedimentary rock analysis near the Gulf of Mexico on Earth, and computer modeling. Researchers trained their computer model using images of lava terrain and layers of rock made by Curiosity on Mars, as well as three-dimensional scans of sedimentary rock layers on the seafloor near the Gulf of Mexico.