SPACE JUNK: Weight: 1400-lb. Size: Akin to a double-wide refrigerator. It is, in short, one big piece of space junk:

Photo credit: The crew of the International Space Station. [more]

Pictured above is the Early Ammonia Servicer (EAS), hurled into space this week by astronauts working outside the International Space Station: movie. The EAS was installed in 2001 as an ammonia reservoir for the station's internal cooling system, but it was no longer needed after an improved cooling system was activated in 2006. So, astronauts pushed it overboard to make room for new construction.

The tank is now circling Earth. On July 25th, Kevin Fetter used a low-light video camera to photograph EAS tumbling across the sky over his home in Brockville, Ontario: movie. "The flashes were about 6th magnitude," he estimates--not quite visible to the naked eye. The brightness will increase about a year from now when the orbit decays and EAS enters Earth's atmosphere as a flaming meteor.