BEIJING — Remnants of
China's biggest rocket landed in the
Indian Ocean on Sunday, with the bulk of its components destroyed upon re-entry
into the Earth's atmosphere, according to Chinese state media, ending days of
speculation over where the debris would hit.
اضافة اعلان
The coordinates given by state media, citing the
China Manned Space Engineering Office, put the point of impact in the ocean, west of
the Maldives archipelago.
Debris from the
Long March 5B has had some people looking
warily skyward since shortly after it blasted off from China's Hainan island on
April 29, but the China Manned Space Engineering Office said most of the debris
was burnt up in the atmosphere.
State media reported parts of the rocket re-entered the
atmosphere at 10:24am Beijing time (0224 GMT) and landed at a location with the
coordinates of longitude 72.47 degrees east and latitude 2.65 degrees north.
The US Space command confirmed the re-entry of the rocket
over the Arabian Peninsula, but said it was unknown if the debris impacted land
or water.
"The exact location of the impact and the span of
debris, both of which are unknown at this time, will not be released by US Space
Command," it said in a statement on its website.
The Long March was the second deployment of the 5B variant
since its maiden flight in May 2020. Last year, pieces from the first Long
March 5B fell on Ivory Coast, damaging several buildings. No injuries were
reported.
With most of the Earth's surface covered by water, the odds
of populated area on land being hit had been low, and the likelihood of
injuries even lower, according to experts.
But uncertainty over the rocket's orbital decay and China's
failure to issue stronger reassurances in the run-up to the re-entry fuelled
anxiety.
During the rocket's flight, Harvard-based astrophysicist
Jonathan McDowell told Reuters that the potential debris zone could have been
as far north as New York, Madrid or Beijing, and as far south as southern Chile
and Wellington, New Zealand.
Ever since large chunks of the NASA space station Skylab
fell from orbit in July 1979 and landed in Australia, most countries have
sought to avoid such uncontrolled re-entries through their spacecraft design,
McDowell said.
"It makes the Chinese rocket designers look lazy that
they didn't address this," said McDowell, a member of the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The Global Times, a Chinese tabloid published by the
official People's Daily, dismissed as "Western hype" concerns that
the rocket is "out of control" and could cause damage.
"It is common practice across the world for upper
stages of rockets to burn up while reentering the atmosphere," said Wang
Wenbin, a spokesman at the Chinese foreign ministry, at a regular media
briefing on May 7.
"To my knowledge, the upper stage of this rocket has
been deactivated, which means that most of its parts will burn up upon
re-entry, making the likelihood of damage to aviation or ground facilities and
activities extremely low," Wang said at the time.
The rocket, which put into orbit an unmanned Tianhe module
containing what will become living quarters for three crew on a permanent
Chinese space station, is set to be followed by 10 more missions to complete
the station by 2022.
Heavy-lift Long March 5 rockets have been key to China's
near-term space ambitions - from the delivery of modules and crew of the
planned space station to launches of exploratory probes to the Moon and even
Mars.
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