Chinese space rocket will fall to Earth on Sunday: details are known

Experts believe that part of the rocket fragments will not burn up in the atmosphere and will fall on an area measuring 2000 by 70 km.

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The Chinese carrier rocket Changzheng-5V, after fulfilling its goal, and this is the delivery of the next module for the Chinese space station called Tiangong, returns to Earth. This makes it a spent stage 30 meters long and weighing 22 tons. The problem is that the Chinese side does not provide a controlled descent of the rocket and experts believe that it will not completely burn up in the atmosphere and part of its rather large fragments will fall to the surface on Sunday, July 31, reports SciecneAlert.

The Long March-5V launch vehicle made its third flight in 2 years and this time its mission was to deliver a new segment to the Chinese space station. But its spent stage will soon enter the Earth’s atmosphere and, as expected, most of the rocket will fall apart and burn out. But experts predict that quite large parts of the rocket will remain, with a total weight of 4 to 9 tons, which will reach the surface of the planet and this will happen this Sunday, July 31. Previously Focus wrote that this rocket will fall to Earth on August 1.

Where will the Chinese missile land?

The Chinese manned space agency CMSA said that as of July 27, the rocket orbited the Earth in an elliptical orbit at a distance of 263 km at its farthest point and 176 km at its closest point from the surface of the planet. No new data has been received yet.

According to experts from the American non-profit organization The Aerospace Corporation, it is not yet possible to determine the exact location of the rocket’s fall, this will become known when it enters the Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday. Experts have compiled a rough map showing in which region of the Earth a Chinese rocket can enter the atmosphere.

Experts believe that large fragments of the falling rocket will fall on an area that will be approximately 2,000 km long and 70 km wide. The wreckage of the Long March-5V rocket has already fallen not into the ocean, but on land, and this happened in 2020 in West Africa. Then the wreckage fell near small settlements and there were no casualties.

Can people get hurt?

According to analyst Ted Muhlhaupt of The Aerospace Corporation, the likelihood that rocket debris will cause significant damage to infrastructure, and even more so to people, is very low, but not zero.

“According to our forecasts, there is a possibility that large debris will fall on a human-populated area. According to preliminary estimates of the flight path of rocket debris, 88% of the inhabitants of the Earth live in this area where they can fall. Although 75% of this territory is occupied by water, desert and jungle,” Mühlhaupt says.

According to the analyst, the same Chinese rocket also made an uncontrolled descent into the atmosphere last year and not all of its parts burned out. Some debris fell to Earth, but into the Indian Ocean.

Experts believe that the probability that someone will be injured or die from falling rocket debris ranges from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 230. And this is a fairly high figure, because scientists believe that mainly the risk of injury or the risk of being killed from such an event is 1 in 10,000.

But Mühlhaupt still believes that the risk of suffering from a space fall for any person is much lower, and it is 6 in 10 trillion. In comparison, the chance of being struck by lightning is 80,000 times higher.

It is worth noting that, for example, NASA and SpaceX use reusable rockets and their spent stages are returned to Earth intact and in a precisely defined place, in order to then carry out the next launches.

About what are the chances of being killed from the fall of a space rocket Focus already wrote. A new study that concerns space debris was conducted by scientists from Canada.

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