Will it fall over our heads? .. The Chinese Space Administration is having difficulty returning a rocket safely to Earth

After their success in delivering a basic technical piece to the Chinese space station, to be announced for completion next year, it seems that scientists from the Chinese National Space Administration are facing a problem in re-entering the remains of the rocket that carried the mission back to Earth, which carries a degree of danger to humans below.

Heavy load

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The Long March 5B missile, called “Long March 5B”, is the largest and most powerful Chinese missile. The remaining piece is about 30 meters long and 4 meters wide, and weighs about 21 tons, which makes it the most dangerous payload from space in several decades.

Currently, the remaining piece of the “Long March 5B” missile orbits the Earth once every 90 minutes in low Earth orbit, between about 170 and 370 km above the surface of the Earth, and some ground-based radars have detected that it wobbles uncontrollably.

This means that those in charge of it from the Chinese National Space Administration are not able to accurately direct it to enter the Earth in a specific area (usually in an ocean), and then the remnants of the missile are prepared to fall to the ground at any moment within a week.

But it is not known, nor is it possible, to determine in which places the remnants of this missile might fall, except that, based on its current orbit, the missile passes over the ground in a line that extends from New York to Madrid to Beijing and then southern Chile and New Zealand, during this path. It passes to the countries of the Arab world.

And because 71% of the Earth’s surface is represented by the oceans, the remaining pieces are most likely to fall into the water, but there is still a low probability that they will fall to the ground.

Uncertainty

When a missile remnant falls from space, it usually burns in the atmosphere and nothing falls to the surface of the earth, but because the weight of this Chinese piece is greater than usual, there are fears that the denser parts of the two main engines of the rocket will survive and head to the surface of the earth in the form of small pieces .

This is not the first time that this happens, as in May 2020 parts of one of the Chinese missiles (of the same class) penetrated the atmosphere, and the bulk of it fell in the Atlantic Ocean, but some debris fell in populated villages in Ivory Coast, West Africa, but No injuries were reported.

And until the moment of writing these words, never before had a person been hit on the ground by the remnants of a missile or a satellite, although the incidents of the fall of space technology parts to the Earth were repeated more than once, and yet everything is possible.