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The remnants of China’s largest rocket fired last week are expected to return to the atmosphere in the coming hours, European and U.S. monitoring centers have reported.
The main 18-tonne segment of the March Long-5B rocket, which launched the first module of China’s new space station into Earth orbit on April 29, is in free fall and experts say it is difficult to say exactly where and when it will do so. enter the atmosphere.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Friday that most of the waste would be burned when re-entering it can be very unlikely to arise.
“The probability of causing damage to the ground is very low,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters.
The U.S. Space Command estimates that re-entry would take place on Sunday at 02:11 GMT, an hour or so away, at the Orbital Reentry and Debris Studies (CORDS) center at Aerospace Corporation, a U.S.-funded space-focused research and development center . , the forecast was changed to 03:02 GMT two hours a day by re-entering the Pacific rocket.
The EU Space Surveillance and Monitoring (EU SST) said the final forecast for the re-entry of the 5B rocket body in March was 139 minutes on both sides of the GMT at 02:32 on Sunday.
The EU SST said the statistical probability of impact on the ground in a populated area is “low”, but noted that the uncontrolled nature of the object has made predictions reliable.
Space-Track, according to data collected by the US Space Command, has estimated that the waste would re-enter the Mediterranean basin.
Traveling at a speed of 4.8 miles (13.7 km) per second, the one-minute difference in re-entry is a difference of hundreds of kilometers on the ground.
“It’s hard to predict and not an accurate measurement,” Space-Track wrote on Twitter.
Long March 5B – one core stage and four boosters – He left the Chinese island of Hainan on April 29 Tianhe module, which includes what will become a permanent space station in China.
The rocket will be followed by another 10 missions to complete the station.
Most experts believe that the risk to people is low.
“Given the size of the object, it is bound to be large pieces,” said Florent Delefie, an astronomer at the Paris-PSL Observatory.
“The chances of landing waste in an inhabited area are very small, probably one in a million.”
In May 2020, the first March 5B long pieces fell on Côte d’Ivoire and damaged several buildings. He was not injured.
Chinese rocket launch debris is not uncommon in China. In late April, authorities in the Shiyan city, Hubei province, sent a note to people in the surrounding region to prepare for the evacuation, as land was expected to be excavated in the area.
“The re-entry of March Long 5B is unusual in launching because the first phase of the rocket reached orbital speed, as usual, instead of dropping,” Aerospace Corporation said in a blog post.
“The body of the empty rocket is in an elliptical orbit around the Earth where it is crawling toward an uncontrolled entrance.”
The empty core stage has been losing altitude since last week, but the rate of its orbital decay is uncertain due to unpredictable atmospheric variables.
It is one of the largest space debris to return to Earth. Experts estimate that its dry mass is between 18 and 22 tons.
The first phase of the long March 5B, which returned to Earth last year, weighed nearly 20 tons, surpassed only in 2003 by the wreckage of the space shuttle Columbia, the Soviet Union’s Salyut 7 space station in 1991, and NASA’s Skylab in 1979.
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