With clear sky and a pair of binoculars, people on Earth may be able to see the wayward bag, EarthSky said. The key is to look up towards the space station, then look around for the bag, according to EarthSky.
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The two astronauts are not the first to lose a tool bag during a spacewalk. A tool bag floated away from an astronaut in 2008 while she performed some maintenance outside the space station.
The bag is now among thousands of objects floating through space. The European Space Agency said in September that there were more than 35,000 debris objects in space, which are tracked and catalogued by space surveillance networks. Those items could include tools such as grease guns and bolts, and they are tracked to avoid damaging satellites.
There are also thousands of smaller “debris objects” floating in space that are not tracked, according to the agency.
O’Hara and Moghbeli of the US Marine Corps have been on the space station for several weeks. O’Hara docked onto the space station aboard a Soyuz rocket on September 15, according to NASA. Moghbeli docked onto the space station on August 27 as the commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, the agency said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.