‘Potentially not good’: Chinese rocket hurtling back to Earth may hit Saturday
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A huge, possibly uncontrolled section of a Chinese Long March 5B rocket is falling back to Earth and is expected to hit sometime on Saturday, the U.S. Defense Department said. Experts warn it could strike an inhabited area, but it’s more likely that debris will fall harmlessly into the ocean.
Where it will hit “cannot be pinpointed until within hours of its reentry,” the Pentagon said in a statement earlier this week.
U.S. officials are watching the rocket’s trajectory. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin is “aware and he knows the space command is tracking, literally tracking this rocket debris,” Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said.
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China’s government has said it expects most of the rocket to burn up during reentry.
The Long March 5B rocket carrying China’s Tianhe space station core module lifted off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in southern China’s Hainan province April 29, 2021. Known as the Heavenly Harmony, the space station will be China’s first to host astronauts long-term.
China plans 10 more launches to carry additional parts of the space station into orbit.
Is the Chinese rocket falling to Earth?
Yes, and “it’s potentially not good,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Astrophysics Center at Harvard University, told the Guardian earlier this week.
Usually discarded core rockets, or first-stage rockets, plunge to the sea soon after liftoff and don’t go into orbit like this one did.
What is China saying about the rocket?
According to China, the rocket that’s falling to Earth will mostly burn up on reentry, posing little threat to people and property on the ground, the nation’s government reassured the world on Friday.
Speaking in Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said China was closely following the rocket’s reentry into the atmosphere, Reuters reported.
“The probability of this process causing harm on the ground is extremely low,” he said.
China’s space agency has yet to say whether the main stage of the huge Long March 5B rocket is being controlled or will make an out-of-control descent.
Where will the Chinese rocket land?
No one knows for sure. McDowell told CNN that pinpointing where debris could be headed is almost impossible because of the speed the rocket is traveling – even slight changes in circumstance drastically change the trajectory.
The debris will be dragged toward Earth by increasing collisions with molecules in the Earth’s atmosphere, Space News said.
One group has made a prediction, however: The nonprofit Aerospace Corp. expects the debris to hit the Pacific Ocean near the equator after passing over eastern U.S. cities roughly 8 hours before or after 12:19 a.m. Sunday Eastern time.
The debris’ orbit covers a swath of the planet from New Zealand to Newfoundland.
How big is the Chinese rocket that’s falling to Earth?
It’s roughly 100 feet long and and would be among the biggest pieces of space debris to fall to Earth.
“It’s almost the body of the rocket, as I understand it, almost intact, coming down,” Kirby said this week.
Has a rocket fallen to Earth before?
Yes. Last year, part of a Chinese rocket, one of the largest pieces of uncontrolled space debris ever, passed directly over Los Angeles and Central Park in New York City before landing in the Atlantic Ocean, CNN said.
The 18-ton rocket that fell last May was the heaviest debris to fall uncontrolled since the Soviet space station Salyut 7 in 1991.
China’s first space station, Tiangong-1, crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2016 after Beijing confirmed it had lost control. In 2019, the space agency controlled the demolition of its second station, Tiangong-2, in the atmosphere.
Source: The Associated Press; maps4news.com/©HERE; USA TODAY research
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: ‘Potentially not good’: Chinese rocket hurtling back to Earth may hit Saturday