Big piece of a Russian rocket crashed on Earth, “return of Persei confirmed”

The upper stage Perseus of a Russian rocket Angara A5 it crashed into Earth in an uncontrolled way yesterday evening Italian time, hitting the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean at 21:08 UTC (22:08 in Italy).

“Confirmed Persei’s return: 21:08 UTC on 121 W 14S in the South Pacific,”Confirmed the astronomer via Twitter Jonathan McDowell, dell’Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The latitude / longitude position corresponds to a stretch of sea east of French Polynesia.

Persei’s journey ended after 9 days in flight: she suffered a block with a fictitious payload during a test that took place last December 27th. Apparently Persei was unable to restart as planned for a second start of the engine, which should have sent it from low Earth orbit to a much higher geostationary position.

Persei was a rather large space debris. At takeoff, here on Earth, it weighed about 19.5 tons, but most of it was propellant: the fuel was probably dumped while the stadium was in orbit, so the piece that fell to Earth probably weighed about 3.2 tons. , according to Anatoly Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com.

Most of the rocket almost certainly burned out in Earth’s atmosphere, according to McDowell, who analyzed the available tracking data.
“Any damage from any debris will be minimal (it may dent some unfortunate’s roof, but it won’t wipe out humanity), ”McDowell wrote on Twitter before confirming the return.
McDowell’s was the response to a tweet to a user who asked him if Persei’s accident would be similar to the scenario presented in the “Don’t Look Up”, which tells the story of two astronomers trying to warn people about a large comet en route to Earth (the film is mostly satire and the coming comet is a metaphor for climate change and humanity’s inadequate response to its disastrous impacts).

Everyone will remember what happened in the May 2021, a controversial example of space junk reentry, the 23-ton central stage of a Chinese booster Long March 5B, which fell into Earth’s orbit after 10 days.
On April 28, the carrier had successfully placed the central module of the new Chinese space station into orbit, becoming a piece of space junk instead of diving into the ocean shortly after take-off, as is typically the case with boosters in most launches. Hence the controversy.

The launch on December 27 was the third test flight for the Angara A5, the development of which was affected by a number of delays. The first two heavy lifter launches, which took place in December 2014 and December 2020, both managed to carry payloads into the desired orbit.

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