The 23-ton Long March 5B rocket carrying the Wentian laboratory module lifted off from Hainan Island at 2:22 pm local time on Sunday, July 24, and the module successfully docked with the Advanced Orbital the china His job complete, the rocket is gone. in an uncontrolled descent into the Earth’s atmosphere and it is not clear where it will land. The uncontrolled descent marks the third time the country has been accused of not properly managing space debris from its rocket stage. “It’s a 20-ton metal object. Although it will break up as it enters the atmosphere, numerous pieces, some of them quite large, will reach the surface,” said Michael Byers, a professor at the University of British Columbia and author of a recent study on the risk of casualties from space debris. Space debris poses an extremely minimal risk to humans, Byers explained, but it’s possible that larger pieces could cause damage if they land in inhabited regions. Byers said that due to the increase in space junk, these small possibilities are becoming more likely, especially in the Global South, according to research published in the journal Nature Astronomy, with rocket bodies having about three times as many probabilities of landing at latitudes. of Jakarta, Dhaka and Lagos than those of New York, Beijing or Moscow.
“This risk is entirely avoidable, as technologies and mission designs now exist that can provide controlled entries (usually into remote areas of the oceans) rather than uncontrolled and therefore completely random,” he said by email.
Holger Krag, head of the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office, said international best practice was to carry out a controlled re-entry, aimed at a remote part of the ocean, whenever the risk of casualties was too high.
He added that the rocket’s re-entry zone was geographically limited between the latitudes of 41 degrees south and 41 degrees north of the equator.
The US Space Command said it will follow the Chinese rocket’s fall to Earth, according to a spokesman.
Based on varying atmospheric conditions, the exact point of entry of the rocket stage into Earth’s atmosphere “cannot be identified until a few hours after re-entry,” the spokesman said, but it is estimated that it will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere around August 1.
The 18th Space Defense Squadron, the part of the US military that tracks the re-entries, will also provide daily updates on their location.
CNN has reached out to China’s Manned Space Agency for comment.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that space debris weighing more than 2.2 tons is usually transported to a specific location on its first Earth orbit.
“The thing is, things that big usually don’t get into orbit without an active control system,” he said.
With “no active control system and no restartable engine to bring it back down to Earth … it just falls into orbit and eventually burns up due to friction with the atmosphere,” McDowell told CNN.
China was heavily criticized last year for its handling of space debris after it launched another module on a similar rocket. Its remains washed up in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives 10 days after the launch.
NASA said China failed to “meet responsible standards.”
“Space nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth from reentries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding these operations,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at the time.
China responded to the criticism by blaming the United States for “raising fears” over the rocket’s re-entry and accused American scientists and NASA of “acting against their conscience” and being “anti-intellectual intellectuals”. In 2020, a Chinese rocket core – weighing nearly 20 tons – made an uncontrolled re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, passing directly over Los Angeles and Central Park in New York City before finally plunging into the Atlantic Ocean.
Space junk, such as old satellites, re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere daily, although most of it goes unnoticed because it burns up long before it can hit the ground.
It is only larger space debris, such as spacecraft and rocket parts, that pose a very small risk to humans and infrastructure on the ground.