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The Chinese rocket that was used to build their space station fell back to Earth. It went back into the air at 10:01 UTC, but at least some of it is likely to have made it to the ground, and no one knows where it landed yet.
China sent its Long March-5B rocket into space on Monday to bring the last module to its Tiangong space station, which is now finished. The core booster of the rocket, which weighs 22 tons and is 16 meters long, has been drifting back toward Earth for the past week.
But this part of the rocket has a chance of making it to the ground. Before it got back into the atmosphere, the first guesses about where this might happen included 88 percent of the world’s population, according to the Aerospace Corporation (AC), a US non-profit that helps the aerospace industry with technical advice.
Because the booster is moving so fast—nearly 30,000 km/h—its exact time of reentry affects where it will land. A few seconds can change where it will land by tens of kilometers. A place of impact hasn’t been figured out yet.
The People’s Republic of China Long March 5B rocket #CZ5B came back into the atmosphere over the south-central Pacific Ocean on November 4 at 4:01 a.m. MDT/10:01 a.m. UTC. Again, the PRC has more information about where the uncontrolled reentry will hit.
A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry told The New York Times that it was unlikely that the rocket would hurt aviation or people on the ground and that “China has always used outer space for peaceful purposes in line with international law and international practice” (re-entering the last stage of a rocket is an international practice).
The first Chinese rocket launch, a Long March-5B, seemed to scatter debris over villages in the Ivory Coast in May 2020. In July 2020, another Long March 5B rocket used to launch a space station module landed in the water near the Philippines and Malaysia.
Given the last two orbits of the booster, however, the risk to the public would have been almost nothing if you lived in the same latitude as Europe, Russia, Asia, or South America. People outside of these areas would have had a chance of getting hit, but it was still very unlikely—about 1 in 10 trillion.
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