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History repeats itself. As has already happened in 2020 and 2021, a component of the rocket Chinese Long March 5Bweighing about 25 tons, which on 24 July brought a module from the Tiangong space station into orbit, is in uncontrolled fall towards the Land, at a speed of approximately 24,000 kilometers per hour. The exact time and place of the impact is not yet known, but it should take place on July 30in an area that also covers most populated areas on Earth. Much of the space debris is expected to burn on reentry, but given its size, around 20-40% of its mass could reach the earth’s soil.
A story already seen
It was last July 24 when, at 14.22, Beijing time, the Chinese Long March 5B rocket was launched from the Wenchang Space Center on Hainan Island, China’s southernmost province. The goal, that of bring the Wentian module into orbit, which will be part of the Chinese Tiangong space station and which will contain a laboratory, three spaces for astronauts to sleep and an airlock for spacewalks. The Long March 5B rockets were built specifically to send the modules of the Chinese space station into orbit, and it is there third time that they are launched from the Earth.
In particular, it is also the third time that a component of the rocket – the central modulethe heaviest one – is destined to fall to Eartha few days after launch, in uncontrolled manner. As we had already told you, in 2020 part of the rocket crashed in the Atlantic Ocean, off the west coast of Africa, with debris causing damage but no injuries to Ivory Coast villages; in 2021, however, the module fell in the Indian oceannear the Maldives.
What the experts say
Most other rockets used by space agencies and private companies are designed so that the central modulewhich contains the engines useful for propulsion, return to the atmosphere shortly after launch with a controlled fall at sea, in sparsely populated parts of the Earth or by making a landing to be reused, as happened with the SpaceX Falcon 9. Instead the loading modulewhich is separated from the launcher, has an additional motor which gives it a final boost and which allows it to leave the atmosphere.
The Long March 5B, on the other hand, having no additional motors, instead pushes completely out of the atmosphere before the modules separate. At that point the central module it will travel in orbit for days or weeks before re-entering Earth’s atmospherethen landing uncontrollably in a point that is not easy to establish in advance, because it depends on many variables.
“60-70% of the central stages of rockets launched into space are subject to uncontrolled reentry, but usually these are much smaller objects“, He explains toHandle Luciano Anselmo, researcher at the “Alessandro Faedo” Institute of Information Science and Technologies of the Cnr (Isti-Cnr). “In this case, however, we are talking about about 25 tons: it is the most massive object that can re-enter without control“. According to experts from The Aerospace Corporationwho work at the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (Cords) and who deal with space debris, such a large reentry will not burn completely in the Earth’s atmosphere, but the 20-40% of its mass (which is equivalent to 5-10 tons) can arrive on Earth.
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