A Chinese Rocket Is Out Of Control And Falling Towards Earth Right Now

[flash13]

A Chinese Rocket Is Out Of Control And Falling Towards Earth Right Now

 

 

 

Sometime in the next few hours, the body of a spent Chinese rocket will become the largest piece of space junk in decades to fall, uncontrolled, back towards Earth.

 

On May 5, a Long March 5B rocket launched a prototype crew capsule resembling a SpaceX Crew Dragon to orbit for a test. Now, after almost a week orbiting the Earth, the core stage of the large

 

rocket is on a collision course with the upper atmosphere and whatever doesn’t burn up during its descent will impact the planet.

 

“It is the most massive object to make an uncontrolled reentry since the 39-tonne Salyut-7 in 1991,” wrote Jonathan McDowell, a prominent Harvard astrophysicist who tracks objects in orbit, on

 

Twitter.

 

The US military, the private Aerospace Corporation and others are tracking the object, with the latest projections showing that the 37,000 pound rocket could enter the atmosphere and begin

 

burning up at any moment.

Rocket re-entries are notoriously difficult to predict, as the object is moving at thousands of miles per hour. When it breaks up, debris that makes it to the ground can be spread over hundreds or

 

thousands of miles.

 

Often, larger space vehicles are equipped with means to steer the craft to re-enter over a safe location (typically the south Pacific), but that doesn’t seem to be the case with this rocket.

The rocket body is more massive than the Chinese Tiangong-1 space station that plummeted back to Earth (presumably landing somewhere in the ocean) in 2018. It’s about a fifth the mass of

 

Skylab, which came back to Earth near Perth, Australia in 1979.

 

Most of the rocket is expected to burn up, but small pieces could make it to the surface, and it may be visible in the sky as it sizzles and meets its end.

 

17,262 views|May 11, 2020,11:06am EDT

A Chinese Rocket Is Out Of Control And Falling Towards Earth Right Now

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Science

I cover science and innovation and products and policies they create.

 

China Launches New Large Rocket Long March-5B

 

WENCHANG, CHINA - MAY 05: China's new large carrier rocket Long March-5B carrying the trial version ... [+] China News Service via Getty Images

 

Sometime in the next few hours, the body of a spent Chinese rocket will become the largest piece of space junk in decades to fall, uncontrolled, back towards E

arth.

 

On May 5, a Long March 5B rocket launched a prototype crew capsule resembling a SpaceX Crew Dragon to orbit for a test. Now, after almost a week orbiting the Earth, the core stage of the large

 

rocket is on a collision course with the upper atmosphere and whatever doesn’t burn up during its descent will impact the planet.

 

“It is the most massive object to make an uncontrolled reentry since the 39-tonne Salyut-7 in 1991,” wrote Jonathan McDowell, a prominent Harvard astrophysicist who tracks objects in orbit, on

 

  

 

 

The US military, the private Aerospace Corporation and others are tracking the object, with the latest projections showing that the 37,000 pound rocket could enter the atmosphere and begin

 

burning up at any moment.

 

The rocket body is more massive than the Chinese Tiangong-1 space station that plummeted back to Earth (presumably landing somewhere in the ocean) in 2018. It’s about a fifth the mass of

 

Skylab, which came back to Earth near Perth, Australia in 1979.

 

Most of the rocket is expected to burn up, but small pieces could make it to the surface, and it may be visible in the sky as it sizzles and meets its end.

 

Rocket re-entries are notoriously difficult to predict, as the object is moving at thousands of miles per hour. When it breaks up, debris that makes it to the ground can be spread over hundreds or

 

thousands of miles.

 

Often, larger space vehicles are equipped with means to steer the craft to re-enter over a safe location (typically the south Pacific), but that doesn’t seem to be the case with this rocket.

 

What does seem certain is that the rocket will re-enter the atmosphere and begin breaking up, if that hasn’t already happened. The spent rocket, which has been labeled CZ-5B by the agencies

 

tracking it, flies within about 41 degrees north and south attitude.

 

That means any bits that make it to the surface will likely land somewhere in that range, which includes New York in the north, Australia in the south and everything in between.

 

 

The good news is that there’s almost no reports through history of space junk injuring or killing people, as it typically falls in the ocean or remote areas, which make up much of Earth’s surface.

 

However, it’s definitely a good idea to keep an eye on the sky today.

 

Source

 

[Ha91]

senseless and clickbait article!

If there is no threat then it is not necessarily "falling towards earth" to 'hit us'  

[frankl1n]

I hope it crashes to Earth and lands directly on my place of work while I am still off due to Covid-19, preferably on a Wednesday morning as my immediate supervisor is the only one on site at this time. 

32 minutes ago, flash13 said:

That means any bits that make it to the surface will likely land somewhere in that range, which includes New York in the north, Australia in the south and everything in between.

 

[Karlston]

Large chunks of a Chinese rocket missed New York City by about 15 minutes

China's Long March 5B rocket launched without a second stage.

Enlarge / A Long March 5B rocket lifts off from the Wenchang launch site on China's southern Hainan Island on May 5, 2020.

STR/AFP via Getty Images

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A week ago, China launched the newest version of its largest rocket, the Long March 5B, from its southernmost spaceport. The launch proceeded normally and represented another success for China as it seeks to build a robust human spaceflight program. Over the next few years, this rocket will launch components of a modular space station.

 

Notably, because of this rocket's design, its large core stage reached orbit after the launch. Typically during a launch, a rocket's large first stage will provide the majority of thrust during the first minutes of launch and then drop away before reaching an orbital velocity, falling back into the ocean. Then, a smaller second stage takes over and pushes the rocket's payload into orbit.

 

However, the Long March 5B rocket has no second stage. For last week's launch, then, four liquid-fueled strap-on boosters generated most of the thrust off the launch pad. After this, the core stage with two YF-77 main engines pushed an experimental spacecraft into orbit before the payload separated.

 

This left the large core stage, with a mass slightly in excess of 20 tons, in an orbit with an average altitude of about 260km above the Earth. Because the perigee of this orbit was only about 160km above the planet, the core stage was slowly drawn back toward the planet as it interacted with the planet's upper atmosphere.

 

This is a rather large object to make an uncontrolled return to Earth. According to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and keen observer of satellites, this is the largest vehicle to make an uncontrolled reentry into Earth's atmosphere since 1991, when the Soviet Salyut 7 space station broke up over Argentina.

Engines likely survived

The core stage is estimated to have a mass of about 21 tons, including extra fuel on board, but it's not clear how much of the rocket survived its interaction with the atmosphere. Although he did not have access to a detailed model of debris, McDowell estimated that at the very least, dense components of the rocket's engines would have survived.

 

"I would not be surprised if several bits with masses of the order of 100 to 300kg hit the surface," he told Ars. "I would be a bit surprised if anything as big as 1 metric ton did."

 

The US Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron confirmed that the core stage re-entered Earth's atmosphere at 11:33am ET (15:33 UTC) on Monday at a location over the Atlantic Ocean. At this point, the core stage would have been at an altitude of 80km and rapidly descending toward Earth. McDowell said there were some reports emerging about possible debris found downrange in Cote d'Ivoire.

 

It is perhaps worth noting that before it entered Earth's atmosphere, the core stage track passed directly over New York City. Had it reentered the atmosphere only a little bit earlier, perhaps 15 to 20 minutes, the rocket's debris could have rained down on the largest metro area in the United States.

 

China has previously shown a disregard for debris from its rocket launches, however. It frequently launches rockets from pads surrounded by land. This has led to debris from first and second stages falling on villages in the country.

 

It is not clear whether future launches of the Long March 5B rocket will continue to send its core stage into an unstable orbit or if this was a one-off instance during the rocket's test flight. Certainly this will be discouraged, at the very least, by other nations.

 

 

Source: Large chunks of a Chinese rocket missed New York City by about 15 minutes (Ars Technica)