China closely monitoring uncontrolled debris from rocket. It could hit Earth within days

China said on Wednesday (July 27) that it is closely monitoring the latest piece of big Chinese space junk that will fall back on Earth. Experts are concerned as they are not sure where exactly it will land. Although, they have estimated the re-entry to happen around the end of the month, probably on July 31 at 02:22 UTC ± 17 hours. 

China Manned Space Agency said that only small parts of the Tianzhou-3 ship survived to fall safely Wednesday into a predetermined area of the South Pacific. 

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Meanwhile, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian on Wednesday rejected such concerns. During a daily briefing, he said: "Since the development stage of the space engineering program, China has taken into consideration the debris mitigation and return from orbit into atmosphere of missions involving rocket carriers and satellite sent into orbit." 

"It is understood that this type of rocket adopts a special technical design that most of the components will be burnt up and destroyed during the reentry process. The possibility of causing damage to aviation activities or on the ground is extremely low," Zhao said. 

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The mentioned rocket junk is roughly 21-tonne. It was part of the Wentian space station module launched on Sunday. A Long March 5B (CZ-5B) rocket propelled the uncrewed Wentian spacecraft from the Wenchang launch centre on China’s tropical island of Hainan. 

The re-entry path of the rocket body from the CZ-5B launch is been tracked by The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital Reentry and Debris Studies (CORDS). 

And as per the researchers at The Aerospace Corporation, "There is a non-zero probability of the surviving debris landing in a populated area—over 88 percent of the world's population lives under the reentry's potential debris footprint." 

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