European space officials, also keeping an eye on the rocket, say its orbital path is believed to take it on a trajectory just north of such major cities as New York and Madrid and as far south as southern Chile and New Zealand.
The Long March 5B rocket had launched a section of China’s first permanent space station last week, but the discarded rocket section was not guided into a controlled demolition as is usually the case. Critics say China has not given out key details about the rocket’s stage and trajectory, or whether its core stage will make an uncontrolled landing or not, according to the Associated Press. “An exact prediction is not yet possible as there is still a considerable level of uncertainty,” said Heather Golden, spokeswoman for the Aerospace Corporation. She said the nonprofit’s predicted re-entry time for the rocket as of Wednesday afternoon is May 9 at 02:29 UTC, with a 22-hour window on either side of the estimate.
On April 29, China successfully launched a crew module for a space station that it says will be completed by the end of 2022. But the first stage of the rocket that sent that module into orbit is falling to Earth uncontrollably.
Context
It was true that the drag of Earth s atmosphere tug a portion of a Chinese rocket out of orbit in early May and that, for days, no one knew where the debris could rain down across a swath of the planet. However, China s space agency said the rocket debris had reentered Earth s atmosphere above the Maldives in the Indian Ocean on May 9, and the vast majority of items were burned beyond recognition during the reentry process.
Origin
In May 2021, narrators in viralTikTok videos claimed a portion of a massive Chinese rocket had left Earth’s orbit and was falling back to the planet where it would eventually land within the next couple weeks.
UK Space Industry Aims to Remove Dangerous Space Junk from Orbit By Thomas Pfeiffer and Thomas Seal | April 16, 2021
A defunct satellite spent early April hurtling through space toward the body of an old rocket, threatening a collision that the European Union’s Space Surveillance and Tracking Consortium estimated could generate more than 4 million pieces of debris.
In the end, the two objects just missed each other, but the incident was a reminder of the increasing prevalence and danger of space junk. There are more than 8,000 tons of garbage in orbit, made up of about 26,000 objects wider than 10 centimeters, according to the European Space Agency. Any object of that size could destroy an active satellite, posing a constant threat to the systems that provide everything from weather observation to disaster management to military communications. The worst-case scenario is what’s known as the Kessler Syndrome, in which collisions create additi