Nobody knows when or where a big Chinese rocket body will come down.
The Long March 5B rocket's 25-ton core stage will return to Earth tomorrow. According to the latest forecast by researchers at TheAerospace Corporation, it will be at least five hours before the sun comes up. Wentian, the second module for China's Tiangong space station, was lofted by the booster less than a week ago.
Most of the rocket body will burn up, but large parts of it will survive the fiery passage, according to the Center for Orbital Reentry and debris Studies.
The biggest spaceship to fall out of the sky.
The hunks will come down between 41 degrees north and 41 degrees south. The latest forecast shows that Europe and most of Northern Africa are out of the woods. Some of the debris will fall hundreds of miles from each other.
It's not easy to say much more than that at the moment. An error of one hour in the predicted return time equates to a 17,000-mile error in the location of the footprints.
It's not an indictment of space junk researchers and satellite trackers; forecasting such debris falls is just really, really difficult.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and satellite tracker, said during a discussion about the Long March 5B crash that there's actually weather up there.
It is not possible to predict at what point the satellite will have crashed through the atmosphere and reentered.
The Long March 5B core is not taking a smooth path through the upper atmosphere.
Matthew Shouppe, senior director for commercial space at the California-based tracking company, said during yesterday's discussion that the rocket body appears to beumbling. Since we don't know how that is falling, we can't model that.
Based on geography, we can make educated guesses about the crash. The Long March 5B core is likely to reenter over water because oceans cover 70% of the surface. Most people live in big metropolitan areas that are separated by many miles of open space so a fall over terra firma is not likely to result in injuries.
Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant with The Aerospace Corporation's Corporate Chief Engineer's Office, said there was a 98% chance that nothing would happen.
There is no reason to worry. Feel free to be annoyed that we need to worry at all, for all of us agreed that the crash was very avoidable.
Other rockets don't tend to cause such problems; their big core stages are steered into the ocean or into unpopulated areas shortly after liftoff, or, in the case of SpaceX'sFalcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, come down for vertical landings for future reuse. The Long March 5B core is able to stay aloft until atmospheric drag brings it down.
After the Long March 5B's two previous missions, there were falls. The May 2020 mission resulted in a crash that spread debris over parts of West Africa after the rocket body fell over the empty ocean. Some of the spaceflight hardware may have made it to the ground inIvory Coast.
At 3:40 p.m., the story was changed. The latest prediction from TheAerospace Corporation will be shown on July 29th.
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