A toolbag accidentally dropped by an astronaut during a space walk has been captured on camera orbiting Earth by a co-worker on the International Space Station (ISS).
The bag was in the possession of NASA astronauts Jasmin Moghbeli and Loral O'Hara as they repaired a solar panel on the ISS last week, 321km above the Earth's surface.
At the end of the six-hour space walk, the bag drifted off into space. It will orbit Earth for several months before eventually burning up in our atmosphere early next year.
"During the activity, one tool bag was inadvertently lost. Flight controllers spotted the tool bag using external station cameras. The tools were not needed for the remainder of the spacewalk. Mission Control analyzed the bag's trajectory and determined that risk of recontacting the station is low and that the onboard crew and space station are safe with no action required," wrote NASA on its blog.
A day later, Satoshi Furukawa, a fellow astronaut with Japanese space agency JAXA, inadvertently took a picture of the orbiting tool bag while he photographed Mount Fuji as the ISS passed over his native country.
"In the most improbable of events, Satoshi was actually… taking photos of Mount Fuji and also captured a nice photo of a lost item, the nice crew lock bag from yesterday," Moghbeli told mission control on November 2.
"It wanted to see Mount Fuji, I guess."
NASA headquarters joked that they should have put an Apple AirTag in the bag so that crew could retrieve it the next time they completed an orbit.
Observers may be able to spot the white, satchel-like bag with binoculars, according to EarthSky.
The bag is orbiting Earth two to four minutes ahead of the ISS, so observers would first need to find the space station, which is the third-brightest object in the night sky.
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