What happens when the 5B Truong Chinh rocket falls to Earth?

The Truong Chinh 5B missile may fall later this week, but it is unlikely to cause serious consequences.

This weekend, China’s Long March 5B (Truong Chinh 5B) missile will fall back to Earth. Instead of falling into the sea as originally planned, the Long March 5B was orbiting the Earth and lost control. The silence from the China National Space Administration (CNSA) coupled with the rocket’s too fast travel speed makes scientists at other space research institutions do not have enough computational data, see rockets. Where will it fall. Hard to have human casualties The Long March 5B missile is 30 meters long, weighs 22.5 tons, and when it falls to the ground the equivalent of a small plane falling and debris flying 160 km away. This is the comment of Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. In 2020, a 50 meter long fragment also from a Chinese rocket crashed into the Atlantic, just 13 minutes after passing New York City with 9 million inhabitants. However, a 12-meter-long piece may have crashed in a village on Ivory Coast, according to the report The Verge , from the source of the local newspaper Afriksoir. The villagers heard a loud explosion, lightning, and noise at the same time that scientists calculated missile debris. The 12-meter-long debris that fell on the village of Mahounou on Ivory Coast in May 2020 is believed to have belonged to the Truong Chinh 5B missile. Photo: Afrik Soir. The orbits re-enter the atmosphere of rockets, which are inherently difficult to predict, because they travel at speeds of thousands of kilometers per hour. Scientists can only calculate accuracy after the rocket has returned to the atmosphere and began to fall. However, according to Mr. McDowell’s estimates, there will be no loss of life. Rockets will usually be burned most of the time when they pass through the atmosphere. Only a few parts, which are designed to be more heat resistant, can fall back to Earth. However, with a planet’s surface area of ​​up to 75% that is water, and also much of the ground uninhabited, the probability that missile debris could fall right where humans are inhabited is very low. “The worst scenario is that when a small piece falls on a person, that person is more likely to die. The probability that a lot of people get a debris fall is not high,” said Jonathan McDoWell. With a landing speed of about 160 km / h, debris falling on structures and vehicles will also leave great consequences. However, since the debris will fall in an area up to 160 km in diameter, the likelihood that they will fall into an inhabited, residential area is also very low. The Long March 5B missile contains the core module of the new space station. Photo: Getty Images. According to the Independent Over the past decade there have been about 100 satellites, and the wreckage of the missile returns to Earth every year, with a total mass of 150 tons. However, most of them do not cause serious consequences. The mass of space junk that fell in 2020 is the fourth largest block to fall back to Earth in history, after the Skylab space station in 1979, the Skylab’s rocket deck in 1975, and the Salyut-7, the Soviet space station, At 1991. Big problem with space junk This is not the first time that CNSA has had problems with objects landing on Earth from space. In 2018, the Tiangong-1 space station freely fell into the Pacific, between Australia and Chile. The Ivory Coast incident in May 2020 was also caused by another Long March 5B missile. Although there is little potential to cause material or life damage, the disposal of rockets and satellites out of use still leaves many scientists a headache. When a satellite expires, becomes unusable, it resumes its orbit. A boosters after completing a mission to put the spacecraft into orbit will also be left in the air. And when two objects in the universe collide with each other and create millions of debris, they are also left in space. Cosmic debris are surrounding the Earth. Photo: Nikkei. No one has put a ship on board and collects debris in space. All materials left by humans so far are known as cosmic trash. NASA scientist Donald Kessler believes that colliding with two large pieces of space debris can create a domino effect, causing thousands of smaller debris to continue orbiting the Earth. Mr. Kessler warns there will be a day when space junk becomes so much that we cannot launch a satellite without hitting another object. By then, we will be prisoners on our own planet, and will not blame anyone else but humans. As for the controllable missiles, the space agencies will calculate to bring them back to Point Nemo, which is considered the “graveyard” of spacecraft in the ocean. With the closest distance to the mainland of 2,250 km, the South Pacific Ocean is considered the “pole of the ocean” and is no different than a desert region in the middle of the sea.