11/26/2023 0 Comments Chinese rocket crash location map![]() ![]() "I do see China slowly adopting the norms of other countries in space," McDowell said during Thursday's Aerospace Corporation discussion. There will probably be more Chinese space junk drama after that, but perhaps not for too much longer. The rocket will fly again soon as well: A Long March 5B is expected to launch the third and final Tiangong module this fall. That Long March 5B body reentered over the Arabian peninsula about a week after liftoff, dumping debris over the Indian Ocean. The rocket's second flight, in April 2021, lofted Tianhe, the core module of the Tiangong space station. About 10 days after the rocket's debut launch, in May 2020, pieces of the rocket body rained back to Earth over West Africa, some of them apparently hitting the ground in Ivory Coast. This was the third uncontrolled fall for a Long March 5B core stage to date. Don't panic about the Chinese space junk crash Kessler Syndrome and the space debris problem China's space program: Latest news and launches Related: China's Long March rocket family: History and photos "Doing so is critical to the responsible use of space and to ensure the safety of people here on Earth." "All spacefaring nations should follow established best practices, and do their part to share this type of information in advance to allow reliable predictions of potential debris impact risk, especially for heavy-lift vehicles, like the Long March 5B, which carry a significant risk of loss of life and property," he added. "The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not share specific trajectory information as their Long March 5B rocket fell back to Earth," Nelson said. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson voiced similar sentiments, calling out China in a statement issued today shortly after the reentry. "That would be the responsible thing to do." "What really should have happened is, there should have been some fuel left on board for this to be a controlled reentry," Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the California-based tracking company LeoLabs, said Thursday (July 28) during a Long March 5B reentry discussion that The Aerospace Corporation livestreamed on Twitter. But the fact that the crash occurred at all does not reflect well on China and its spaceflight program, experts say. We'll have to wait a while to see exactly where the rocket debris came down. That location is over open ocean, just off the coast of Palawan Island, which is part of the Philippines. It's "unlikely but not impossible" that one or more chunks hit a population center, he added in another tweet.Ĭhinese space officials, for their part, said the rocket body reentered at 119.0 degrees east longitude and 9.1 degrees north latitude. "The video from Kuching implies it was high in the atmosphere at that time - any debris would land hundreds of km further along track, near Sibu, Bintulu or even Brunei," astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said via Twitter today. One observer appeared to capture the rocket's breakup from Kuching, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, for example, posting video of the dramatic event on Twitter. ![]() “So we’re sitting here waiting for a collision to happen - we too are playing a lottery.Indeed, 5.5 tons to 9.9 tons (5 to 9 metric tons) of the Long March 5B likely survived all the way to the ground today, experts with The Aerospace Corporation's Center for Orbital Reentry and Debris Studies have estimated.Īnd it's possible that falling rocket chunks caused some injuries or infrastructure damage today, given where the Long March 5B reentered. “We try to track them but we can’t control them,” he said. He said that many countries often “park their debris” at lower orbits, leaving parts of rockets up in space where they can sit for years. A map indicating where the rocket re-entered the atmosphere. and other Western countries don’t have the same record of letting their rockets crash down uncontrollably, there are other concerns when it comes to their approaches to orbital spaceflight, according to Pollacco at the University of Warwick. Last month’s launch was the first of 11 such missions planned by China to build the new space station. Credit: Ju Zhenhua /APĪ year ago, another Chinese rocket piece that had carried another part for the space station tumbled uncontrolled over New York and Los Angeles before smashing into Ivory Coast, in West Africa, where it damaged buildings but caused no reported injuries. The Long March 5B rocket carrying a module for a Chinese space station lifts off from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site. Usually, discarded rocket stages re-enter the atmosphere soon after liftoff, normally over water, and don’t go into orbit.Ĭhina plans ten more launches to carry additional parts of the space station into orbit. The Long March 5B rocket carried the main module of Tianhe, or Heavenly Harmony, into orbit on April 29.
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