After days of speculation and tense anticipation, the debris from the Chinese rocket ‘Long March 5B’ reentered Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated over Indian ocean to finally end up landing near Maldives. The news was confirmed by Chinese news agency and U.S. Space command. Although it is not clear whether the impact was on water or on land.

Also Read: Chinese rocket Long March 5B falling uncontrollably towards Earth; Scientists uncertain on crash site

Background

The news of Long March 5B finally entering the atmosphere came after days of constant tracking of the rocket’s whereabouts by the space exploration community. The experts were of the belief that with a rocket that size and the speed with which it was coming towards Earth, it was next to impossible to predict where it may land.

The debris of the rocket came from its largest section which was used in launching the main module of China’s new space station that’s being made. For the uninitiated, rockets that are discarded after they are used to push the associated vehicles to the space are usually discarded. Theses discarded rocket then make a reentry to the Earth’s atmosphere over water. What was unusual with Long March was the fact that the rocket actually ended up going to orbit.

Details

On April 29, China’s Long March 5B rocket was launched from Wenchang Space Center in Hainan province, China. The rocket was carrying the country’s independent Tianhe space station’s (also known as Heavenly Harmony) first module.

It’s a common occurrence that when a rocket is launched, its boosters immediately fall back to Earth after they help the rocket get jettisoned. However, this time, the core 23-ton part of Long March 5B actually ended up going along with the space station module to the Space orbit.

Later, the space authorities confirmed that the rocket will be making its way back to Earth through an “uncontrolled re-entry”. The reason for that was that when a rocket is rubbed against the atmospheric air, there’s a friction due to which an “uncontrolled re-entry” takes place.

A day before its landing, several models and visualizations compiled from multiple space research organizations pointed to the fact that the debris could in fact land along the flight paths etched on the planet. This included flight paths over countries like Australia, Africa, South America, Central America, United States, etc.

China also broke its silence and alleviated the fear among many and confirmed that the rocket would burn up on its forced reentry and will be posing little to no threat to human civilization on the land.

Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from Cambridge was regularly reported and quoted by multiple news platforms. McDowell opined that since the planet is 70% all water, the chances of an ocean landing are the highest. However, he also kept a skeptical opinion on the Chinese space agencies and said how this incident raises serious questions on how China designs its rockets.

On May 9, the Chinese media finally put an end to all the speculations and alarm around the rocket. The media confirmed that the rocket’s major chunk was indeed disintegrated on its atmospheric reentry. Further it also gave the landing coordinates for the debris.

China Central Television was quoted by multiple news agencies saying-

“After monitoring and analysis, at 10:24 (0224 GMT) on May 9, 2021, the last-stage wreckage of the Long March 5B Yao-2 launch vehicle has re-entered the atmosphere, and the landing area is at 72.47° east longitude and 2.65° north latitude”.

The coordinates indicated to a spot on the Indian Ocean.

Later, the Chinese Space Administration which took its fair share of time to divulge any details, finally announced how the debris Entered Earth over the Mediterranean Sea before it flew over the Middle East and finally crashed somewhere near Maldives.

Space-Track also confirmed that the rocket was down in one of its tweets. “Everyone else following the #LongMarch5B re-entry can relax. The rocket is down. You can see all relevant information and updates here on Twitter/Facebook, so there is no need to keep visiting the space-track dot org website,” the agency wrote on its Twitter.