A tool bag dropped by an astronaut on the International Space Station floats through space and can be seen with a simple telescope or very good binoculars.

The bag was dropped on November 1 during an exit from the spacecraft by two astronauts.

It was a spacewalk related to SSI maintenance. A white tool bag was lost in space and then spotted on Earth for the first time by Japanese astronomers.

It will be difficult to spot this bag moving at many thousands of kilometers per hour, but it helps that the white bag is illuminated by the sun’s rays.

This is not the first time an astronaut has lost a tool bag: it happened in 2008 with Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper on Endeavour, who dropped a tool bag.

This bag was valued at $100,000, it orbited for several months, and then disintegrated, falling to Earth. The same will happen with the current bag.

The bag adds to the more than 11,000 tons of “space junk” orbiting Earth. ESA estimates that 36,000 pieces are larger than 10 cm in diameter, meaning they could cause significant damage if they hit a satellite or rocket.

Source USA Today