Debris from a Chinese rocket is expected to crash into Earth over the next few days, with wreckage likely to land across a wide swath of the globe.
Part of a Long March 5B rocket launched by China on July 24 will make an uncontrolled re-entry around July 31, according to Aerospace Corp., an El Segundo, Calif.-based nonprofit that receives US funding.
The possible debris field includes much of the United States, as well as Africa, Australia, Brazil, India and Southeast Asia, according to Aerospace’s forecast.
Concerns over the re-entry and the impact it could have are dismissed by China, however, with state-backed media saying the warnings are just ‘sour grapes’ from people angered by the development of the country as a space power.
“The United States is running out of ways to stop China’s development in the aerospace sector, so slander and slander have become the only things it has left,” the Global Times reported, quoting Song Zhongping, a television commentator who closely follows the Chinese space program.
“US and Western media deliberately exaggerate and exaggerate the ‘loss of control’ of Chinese rocket debris and the likelihood of injury from rocket debris, obviously with bad intentions,” the Guancha.cn news site said. based in Shanghai. Tuesday.
The descent of the booster, which weighs 23 metric tons, is believed to be part of what critics say is a series of uncontrolled crashes that highlights the risks of China’s escalating space race with the United States.
“Due to the uncontrolled nature of its descent, there is a non-zero probability that surviving debris will land in a populated area – more than 88% of the world’s population lives under the potential footprint of re-entry debris,” said Aerospace Tuesday.
In May 2021, pieces of another Long March rocket landed in the Indian Ocean, raising fears the Chinese space agency may have lost control of it.
“It is clear that China is not meeting responsible standards for its space debris,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said that month. “It is essential that China and all space nations and commercial entities act responsibly and transparently in space to ensure the safety, stability, security and long-term sustainability of space activities.”
China’s most recent launch, which sent a module to the national space station, included a booster to put the spacecraft into orbit. That booster is now “dead” and beyond the control of China’s space agency, said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, which is run by Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institution.
“The Chinese are right that the best bet is that it will fall into the ocean,” he said, although “there are a lot of populated areas” within range of the thruster.
More debris could fall to Earth later this year when China launches another Long March rocket to the space station, McDowell said.
China has been closely following the re-entry of the booster since the launch this week, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said at a regular press briefing in Beijing on Wednesday.
“It is customary in international practice for the upper stages of rockets to burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere during reentry,” Zhao said. “From the research and development phase of the space engineering program, it is designed taking into account the mitigation of debris and the return from orbit.”
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