BEIJING –
Debris from a large, newly launched Chinese rocket is expected to re-enter the atmosphere next weekend in an uncontrolled re-entry that the government in Beijing said Wednesday would be closely monitored but posed little risk to anyone on the ground.
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 entire main stage of the rocket – which is 100 feet (30 meters) long and weighs 22 tons (about 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’s body will eventually disintegrate as it plunges through the atmosphere, but it is large enough that numerous pieces are likely to survive fiery reentry in raining debris over an area about 2,000 kilometers (1,240 mi) long by about 70 kilometers ( 44 miles) wide-ranging 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.
Re-entry of the last available tracking data will occur around 0024 GMT Sunday, plus or minus 4 p.m., according to the Aerospace Corp., a government-funded nonprofit research center near Los Angeles.
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 spend extra on designing their rockets to avoid large, uncontrolled re-entries — an imperative that has largely been seen since large chunks of the space station fell off. of NASA Skylab 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 being opaque after the government in Beijing remained silent on the estimated 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 high at its farthest point and 176.6 km at its closest.
No estimated re-entry details were given by CMSA on Wednesday.
(Reporting by Martin Quinn Pollard and Ryan Wu; Additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Bernadette Baum)
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