Experts say a big Chinese rocket body will fall to Earth around THIS date. Read why it is concerning
Tianhe space station
Experts have predicted that the latest piece of big Chinese space junk will fall back to Earth but are not sure where exactly it will land. The re-entry will be around the end of the month, probably on July 31 at02:22 UTC ± 17 hours.
The mentioned rocket is roughly 21-tonne and was part of the Wentian space station module. It was launched on Sunday and docked successfully with the Tiangong space station.
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).
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Is it concerning?
It appeared to be concerning as experts have claimed that they are not sure where the debris will land. Holger Krag, the head of the Space Safety Program Office for the European Space Agency, told SpaceNews: “It is always difficult to assess the amount of surviving mass and number of fragments without knowing the design of the object, but a reasonable ‘rule-of-thumb’ is about 20-40 per cent of the original dry mass.”
Jonathan McDowell, who is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a tweet: “It will break up, but past experience shows that a bunch of 30-metre-long [100 foot] metal fragments will end up crashing into the ground at a few hundred km/hr.”
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McDowell also said that the core stage was not actively deorbited although it is not clear when or when the spent rocket would crash.
In a mail toGizmodo,McDowell said, “Unfortunately we can’t predict when or where. Such a large rocket stage should not be left in orbit to make an uncontrolled re-entry; the risk to the public is not huge, but it is larger than I am comfortable with.”
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