China said it is tracking debris from its recently launched large rocket as it re-enters Earth’s atmosphere this weekend in what Beijing says will pose little risk to anyone on the ground.
The Long March 5B rocket lifted off on Sunday to deliver a laboratory module to China’s under-construction space station, marking the third flight of China’s most powerful rocket since its inaugural launch in 2020.
As it did during its first two flights, the entire rocket’s main core stage, which is 100 feet (30 meters) long and weighs 22 tons (about 48,500 pounds), has already reached a low orbit and is expect it to return to Earth once in the atmosphere. friction drags it down, according to US experts.
The rocket body will ultimately disintegrate as it plunges through the atmosphere, but it is large enough that many pieces will likely survive a fiery reentry into the debris shower in an area of about 2,000 km (1,240 miles) long by about 70 km wide, independent of the United States. analysts based on – 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.
Risk to property, short people
According to the Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit government-funded research center near Los Angeles, the last input of available tracking data will be made on Sunday.
The overall risk to people and property on the ground is quite low, given that 75% of the Earth’s surface in the potential path of the debris is water, desert or jungle, aerospace analyst Ted Muelhaupt told reporters in a press conference.
However, there is a chance that pieces of the rocket could fall on a populated area, as they did in May 2020 when fragments of another Chinese Long March 5B landed in Ivory Coast, damaging several buildings in that nation of West Africa, although there were no injuries. were reported, Muelhaupt said.
By contrast, he said, the United States and most other spacefaring nations generally have the additional expense of designing their rockets to avoid large uncontrolled entries, an imperative largely observed since large chunks of the space station in NASA Skylab fell from orbit in 1979 and landed in Australia.
Overall, the odds of someone being injured or killed this weekend by falling rocket 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.
Waste trajectory
But the risk it poses to any individual is much smaller, of the order of six possibilities for every 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 the debris causing damage to aviation or people and property on the ground is very low. He said most of the rocket’s components would be destroyed on reentry.
Last year, NASA and others accused China of being opaque after the Beijing government remained silent on the estimated debris trajectory or re-entry window for its final Long March rocket flight in May 2021.
The wreckage of that flight ended up landing 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. At 16:00 (0800 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 height at its nearest point.
CMSA did not provide estimated re-entry details on Wednesday.
- Reuters with additional editing by Sean O’Meara
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Sean O’Meara
Sean O’Meara is editor of Asia Financial. He has been a journalist for over 30 years, working on local, regional and national titles in the UK as a writer, sub-editor, page designer and print editor. A football, cricket and rugby fan, he has a particular interest in sports finance.