China’s rocket debris disintegrates over Indian Ocean: Report

Remnants of China’s largest rocket, the Long March, which was launched last week, re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday morning and disintegrated over the Indian Ocean, the country’s state-sponsored media network, the China Central Television (CCTV), reported on Sunday, citing the China Manned Space Engineering Office.

Space-Track, a space monitoring agency that uses US military data, also confirmed that the fact that the rocket is now down. “Everyone else following the #LongMarch5B re-entry can relax. The rocket is down. You can see all relevant information and updates here on Twitter/Facebook, so there is no need to keep visiting the space-track dot org website,” posted Space-Track on Twitter.

There had been much speculation over where the large 18-tonne segment of the Chinese rocket would come down, leading to a renewed panic over possible damage and casualties amid the prevailing coronavirus disease (Covid-19) pandemic. However, most experts had predicted that any loose debris would almost certainly have to come down to the ocean, given the fact that almost 70% of the planet is covered by water. Chinese state media has now laid to rest all such speculations and provided the landing coordinates for rocket debris. It said that a major chunk of it was destroyed on re-entry into the atmosphere.

“After monitoring and analysis, at 10:24 (0224 GMT) on May 9, 2021, the last-stage wreckage of the Long March 5B Yao-2 launch vehicle has re-entered the atmosphere, and the landing area is at 72.47° east longitude and 2.65° north latitude,” news agency AFP cited CCTV as saying, providing coordinates for a point in the Indian Ocean.

Earlier on Friday, the Chinese foreign ministry had said that most of the debris of the Chinese rocket will burn on re-entry and is highly unlikely to cause any harm after the US military said that what it called an uncontrolled re-entry was being tracked by US Space Command.