China tracks debris from 22-ton rocket that hit Earth
China said it was tracking the wreckage of a large, newly launched rocket at the time reenter the earth’s atmosphere this weekend in what Beijing says will pose little risk to anyone on the ground.
The Long March 5B rocket launched Sunday to deliver a laboratory module to the Chinese space station under construction, marking the third flight of China’s most powerful rocket since its maiden launch in 2020.
As happened during its first two flights, the entire main core stage of the rocket – which is 100 feet (30 meters) long and weighs 22 tons (about 48,500 lb) – has reached low orbit and is expected to fall back to Earth after the atmosphere. friction drags it down, according to American experts.
Ultimately, the rocket body will disintegrate as it falls through the atmosphere but is large enough that many chunks will likely survive re-entry into the debris rain over an area about 2,000 km (1,240 mi) long by about 70 km wide. based analysts said on Wednesday.
The likely location of the debris field is impossible to determine in advance, although experts will be able to narrow the potential impact zone closer to re-entry in the days to come.
Risk To Property, Low People
The latest available tracking data project reentry will occur on Sunday, according to the Aerospace Corporation, a government-funded nonprofit research center near Los Angeles.
The overall risk to people and property on land is quite low, given that 75% of the Earth’s surface that could potentially become a debris trail is water, desert or forest, Aerospace analyst Ted Muelhaupt told reporters at a news briefing.
However, there is the possibility of rocket fragments falling over populated areas, as happened in May 2020 when another fragment of China’s Long March 5B landed in Ivory Coast, damaging several buildings in the West African country, although there were no casualties. reported, Muelhaupt said.
Instead, he said, the United States and most other space-exploring nations generally incur additional costs to design their rockets to avoid a large and uncontrolled reentry — a necessity that was largely observed since most of NASA’s Skylab space stations fell out of orbit in 1979. and landed in Australia.
Overall, the odds of someone being injured or killed this weekend from falling rocket chunks ranged from one in 1,000 to one in 230, well above the internationally accepted casualty risk threshold of one in 10,000, he told reporters.
Debris Trail
But the risk posed to each individual is much lower, on the order of six opportunities per 10 trillion. In comparison, he says, the odds of being struck by lightning are about 80,000 times greater.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the likelihood of debris causing damage to flights or people and property on the ground was very low. He said most of the rocket’s components would be destroyed on re-entry.
Last year, NASA and others accused China of being opaque after the Beijing government remained silent about the estimated debris trajectory or re-entry window for the last Long March rocket flight in May 2021.
Debris from the flight eventually landed harmlessly in the Indian Ocean.
Hours after Zhao spoke on Wednesday, China’s Manned Space Agency (CMSA) provided its latest rocket position estimate in a rare public statement. At 16:00 (0800 GMT), the agency said the rocket was circling the globe in an elliptical orbit that is 263.2 km high at its farthest point and 176.6 km high at its closest point.
No details of the reentry forecast were provided by the CMSA on Wednesday.
- Reuters with additional editing by Sean O’Meara
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