Chinese rocket debris has crashed to Earth over the Indian and Pacific oceans, US and Chinese officials say.
China’s space agency said most remains of the Long March 5 burnt in the atmosphere, identifying the Sulu Sea in the Pacific as the re-entry location.
Earlier, space experts had said the probability of the rocket landing in a populated area was extremely low.
The uncontrolled return of rocket’s core stage has raised questions about responsibility for space junk.
There have previously been calls by Nasa for the Chinese space agency to design rockets to disintegrate into smaller pieces upon re-entry, as is the international norm.
In a tweet, the US Space Command said the Long March 5 “re-entered over the Indian Ocean at approx 10:45 am MDT [16:45 GMT] on 7/30”.
It referred its readers to the Chinese authorities for more details.
Meanwhile, China’s space agency gave re-entry co-ordinates as 119 degrees East longitude and 9.1 degrees North latitude. This corresponds to an area in the Sulu Sea – east of the Philippine island of Palawan in the north Pacific.
Recent rockets heading to China’s unfinished space station, known as Tiangong, have lacked the capability for a controlled re-entry.
The latest launch was last Sunday, when the Long March 5 rocket carried a lab module to the Tiangong station. The Chinese government said on Wednesday that the rocket’s re-entry would pose little risk to anyone on the ground because it would most likely land in the sea.
However, there was the possibility for pieces of the rocket to come down over a populated area, as they did in May 2020 when properties in Ivory Coast were damaged.
Before crashing, the empty rocket body was in an elliptical orbit around Earth where it was being dragged toward an uncontrolled re-entry.
Designing objects to disintegrate upon atmospheric re-entry is becoming a priority for satellite operators. It’s done partly by using materials which have low-melting point temperatures, such as aluminium.
In the case of rockets, this can be expensive, as historically the materials used for housing fuel, such as titanium, require very high temperatures to burn up. The sheer size of such objects is also an issue, especially in the case of the Long March 5, weighing over 25 tonnes.
