The remains of the rocket Long March 5B that accompanied the Tianhe space station, which they launched from China on April 29 into space, are “out of control” and could enter Earth’s atmosphere this weekend and collide anywhere on the planet, as reported since eltiempo.es.
Although scientists and experts point out that these debris could completely disintegrate upon entering the atmosphere, or quite likely fall into the sea, where most of the space junk ends up falling, they have ensured that at the moment “nothing can be confirmed or denied.”
It is not possible to specify where or when it will fall
The object, already separated from the spacecraft, has descended 80 kilometers and is about one of the largest objects that can enter Earth uncontrollably, with dimensions of 20 tons and 50 meters high. The experts assure that “They cannot determine where or when it will fall”, but due to its size the collision on land is not ruled out.
However, the digital support of meteorological information in Spain has warned that the probability of it falling in a populated area “is low but not negligible”, since the chance of a person being hit by space debris is approximately one in several trillion.
“Given the orbit of the object, possible landing points are anywhere in a band of latitudes a little further north of New York, Madrid and Beijing and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand“They have explained from eltiempo.es. The reentry is expected to take place between May 7 and 9, although it is not known exactly, so it will be kept under surveillance.
Other rockets that have collided with Earth
As the meteorological agency explains, The entry of rockets into the atmosphere is not such an extraordinary event, and some similar events have already been recorded. In 1979 the space station SkyLab, in the United States, disintegrated with a dimension of 77 tons over the coastal city of Esperance, in Western Australia.
In Spain there are also records of space debris that have collided with the earth’s soil, in 2015 several collisions of space debris were recorded at the beginning of November in Mula and Calasparra, in Murcia, in Elda, Alicante, and days later, a farmer from Pozorrubio de Santiago, a municipality of Cuenca, found a metal object of 20 kilos that could also be a consequence of it.
Well known is also the 2003 case of the OV-102 Columbia, a spacecraft that after 16 days in space with nine astronauts, suffered an accident that ended up tearing the ship apart, and generating a large amount of waste, of more than 100 tons, which spread to the surroundings of Dallas, Texas.
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