According to the Chinese state media, remains of China’s largest rocket landed in the Indian Ocean on Sunday, with the majority of its components being destroyed when it reentered the earth’s atmosphere. That ended days of speculation about where the rubble would hit.
Portions of Long March 5B re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 a.m. Beijing time (0224 GMT) and landed at a location with coordinates of longitude 72.47 degrees east and latitude 2.65 degrees north. Chinese state media cited the China Manned Space Engineering bureau as a saying.
The coordinates define the point of impact in the ocean west of the Maldives archipelago.
Most of the debris was burned in the atmospheresaid the China Manned Space Engineering Office.
In the wreckage of the long March 5th, some people have looked cautiously at the sky since it was blown up from the Chinese island of Hainan on April 29th.
The Long March, which took off last week, was the second deployment of the 5B variant since its maiden flight in May 2020. Last year, parts of the first Long March 5B fell on the Ivory Coast and damaged several buildings. No injuries were reported.
With most of the earth’s surface covered in water, the likelihood of hitting populated areas on land was slim, and experts said the likelihood of injury was even lower.
However, uncertainty about the missile’s disintegration in orbit and China’s failure to provide stronger assurances in advance of reentry fueled fear.
While the rocket was in flight, Harvard-based astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told Reuters that the potential rubble zone could be as far south as New York, Madrid or Beijing and as far as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand.
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Since large parts of NASA’s Skylab space station fell out of orbit in July 1979 and landed in Australia, most countries have tried to avoid such uncontrolled reentries through their spacecraft design, McDowell said.
“It makes the Chinese rocket designers look lazy that they haven’t brought this up,” said McDowell, a member of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The Global Times, a Chinese tabloid published by the official People’s Daily and dismissed as “Western hype”, fears the missile is “out of control” and could cause damage.
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