Beijing says uncontrolled re-entry of missile debris poses little risk to anyone on the ground.
Debris from a large Chinese rocket is expected to pass through the atmosphere this weekend in an uncontrolled re-entry that Beijing says it is tracking closely but poses little risk to anyone on Earth.
The Long March 5B rocket blasted off on Sunday to deliver a laboratory module to China’s new space station under construction into orbit, marking the third flight of China’s most powerful rocket since its first launch in 2020.
As happened during its first two flights, the rocket’s entire main stage — which is 100 feet (30 meters) long and weighs 22 tons (48,500 pounds) — has already reached low orbit and is expected to fall back to Earth after atmospheric friction drags it down, according to US experts.
The rocket body will eventually disintegrate as it plunges through the atmosphere, but it is large enough that numerous pieces are likely to survive fiery re-entry in a debris shower over an area about 2,000 km (1,240 mi) long and about 70 km wide (44 miles). , independent US-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 down the potential impact zone closer to re-entry in the coming days.
The last available re-entry of tracking data projects will occur around 00:24 GMT on Sunday, plus or minus 16 hours, according to Aerospace Corp, a government-funded nonprofit research center near Los Angeles.
The risk is “relatively low”
The overall risk to people and property on the ground is relatively low, given that 75 percent of the Earth’s surface in the potential path of the debris is water, desert or jungle, Aerospace analyst Ted Muehlhaupt told reporters at a news briefing.
However, there is a possibility that pieces of the missile could fall over a populated area, as happened in May 2020 when fragments of another Chinese Long March 5B landed in Ivory Coast, damaging several buildings in that West African country, although no injuries were reported. reported, Muehlhaupt said.
In contrast, he said, the United States and most other space-faring nations typically incur extra costs to design their rockets to avoid large, uncontrolled re-entries — an imperative largely seen after large chunks of the space station NASA’s Skylab fell from orbit in 1979 and landed in Australia.
Overall, the odds of someone being injured or killed this weekend by falling missile fragments range 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.
But the risk any individual poses is much lower, on the order of six chances in 10 trillion. By comparison, he said, 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 aviation 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 lack of transparency after the government in Beijing remained silent on the expected trajectory of debris or the re-entry window of its final Long March rocket flight in May 2021.
Debris from that flight landed harmlessly in the Indian Ocean.
Hours after Zhao spoke on Wednesday, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) gave the approximate position of its latest rocket in a rare public statement. As of 4:00 p.m. (08:00 GMT), the agency said the rocket was circling the globe in an elliptical orbit that was 263.2 km (163.5 miles) high at its furthest point and 176.6 km ( 109.7 miles) to the nearest.
No estimated re-entry details were given by CMSA on Wednesday.
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