The Aerospace Corp, a government-funded nonprofit research center outside Los Angeles, estimates that re-entry will take place at approximately 00:24 GMT on Sunday, plus or minus 16 hours, based on the most recent tracking data.
On July 31, debris from China’s Long March 5B rocket coming towards earth and is expected to crash land anywhere on the planet. This rocket was launched on July 24. The solar-powered Wentian experiment module was being transported to China’s Tiangong Space Station by a rocket that was launched from the province of Hainan.
To escape Earth’s gravity, rockets need a significant amount of fuel, which must be stored in enormous tanks. When a rocket exhausts all of the fuel during its first stage. The empty rocket stage is expelled to reduce weight and, in most cases, burns up as it slams into the Earth’s atmosphere. The Long March 5B weighs over 23 tons and is 176 feet tall, but due to its size, not all of the rocket will ignite upon re-entry. And this debris of rocket heading towards earth.
Marlon Sorge, technical fellow and executive director of the Center for Orbital and Re-entry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corporation, told Newsweek on the event of the rocket coming towards earth– “Our current prediction places the re-entry at 07:52 UTC [3:52 a.m. ET] on Sunday, July 31, plus or minus 21 hours, with a predicted re-entry window in the North Atlantic Ocean. We will be updating this information in real-time throughout the re-entry event.”
Although, rocket coming towards earth in a speedy way; Sorge claims that it’s too soon to determine how much debris will make it through the atmosphere and collapse on Earth, but that as a general rule, 20 to 40% of the mass of a large item should make it to the ground, depending on the design of that object.
Rocket Coming Towards Earth – What are the Predicted Locations?
According to Byers rocket coming towards earth but, there is very little risk to people from space debris, although it is possible that larger pieces could cause harm if they fall into populated areas. According to research published in the journal Nature Astronomy, Byers said those slim chances are growing more likely, particularly in the global south, with rocket bodies being about three times more likely to land in Jakarta, Dhaka, and Lagos than those in New York, Beijing, or Moscow.
Byers also quotes that “This risk is entirely avoidable since technologies and mission designs now exist that can provide controlled reentries (usually into remote areas of oceans) instead of uncontrolled and therefore entire random ones.” [Via mail]
Holger Krag, the head of the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office, mentioned on the occasion of the rocket coming towards earth; that the rocket’s re-entry zone was physically restricted to latitudes between 41 degrees south and north of the equator.
The representative stated that because of variable atmospheric conditions, the precise time a rocket stage enters Earth’s atmosphere cannot be determined until just hours before it reenters, but it is anticipated to do so around August 1.
Daily location updates will also be provided by the US military’s 18th Space Defense Squadron, which monitors reentries.
Rocket Coming Towards Earth – Why is it Impossible to Have the Ultimate Location Pinned Before 11th Hour?
According to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, space debris that weighs more than 2.2 tonnes is frequently carried to a precise place during its first orbit around the planet.
He quoted, “The point is that things that big are normally not put in orbit without an active control system.”
It basically teeters along in orbit and finally burns up due to friction with the atmosphere because it lacks an active control system and an engine that can be restarted to bring it back down to Earth.
NASA – Rocket Coming Towards Earth
After launching another module on a comparable rocket the previous year, China came under fire for its handling of space debris. Ten days after the launch, its remains sank in the Indian Ocean not far from the Maldives. According to NASA, China did not “meet responsible norms.”
NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said, “Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations.”
What is China’s stand on the Event of Rocket Coming Towards Earth
In response to criticism, China accused the US of “acting against their conscience” and being “anti-intellectual” by “hyping up anxieties” regarding the rocket descent.
However, 2020 saw the uncontrolled re-entry of a Chinese rocket core, which weighed close to 20 tonnes and flew over Los Angeles and Central Park in New York City before crashing into the Atlantic Ocean.
On the other hand, according to Beijing, uncontrolled rocket debris re-entry poses little harm to people on the ground.
According to aerospace researcher Ted Muelhaupt, the risk to people and property on the ground is generally modest because water, desert, or rainforest cover 75% of the Earth’s surface, which might be in the route of the debris.
However, there is a chance that the rocket’s bits could land over a populated region, as they did in May 2020 when pieces of a different Chinese Long March 5B landed in the Ivory Coast and damaged a number of structures there, though no injuries were reported, according to Muelhaupt.
According to him, the probabilities of someone being hurt or killed this weekend as a result of falling rocket fragments range from one in 1,000 to one in 230, which is far higher than the generally acknowledged casualty risk threshold of one in 10,000.
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Wrapping Up
Every day, space debris like defunct satellites reenter the Earth’s atmosphere, but most of it is undetected because it burns up before it can impact the earth. Only larger space debris, such as spacecraft and rocket parts, poses even a slight risk to people and ground-based infrastructure. However, considering the size of Long March 5B (which weighs over 23 tonnes and is 176 feet tall), the question still remains the same. Rocket coming towards earth – are we safe?
FAQs
Q1. Where is Long March 5B reentry?
Over the Indian Ocean, the Long March 5B re-entry took place the previous year. At a 41.5 degree inclination to the equator, the Chinese space station orbits the planet at a height of around 236 miles (380 kilometers). The expended Long March 5B core stage might land anywhere between 41.5 degrees north and south latitude based on the orbit.
Q2. What is China’s most powerful rocket?
A Chinese heavy-lift launch vehicle known as Long March 5 or Changzheng 5 (CZ-5), as well as by the nickname “Fat-Five” (Pang-Wu), was created by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT).
Q3. What fuel does the long march use?
Long March 5, Long March 6, and Long March 7, members of the new generation of the Long March rocket family, employ kerosene and LOX as liquid boosters and core stages, respectively, and LOX and LH2 as upper stages. Rocket Long March 11 uses solid fuel.
