![]() Krag added that, on average, 100 to 200 tons of space junk reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in an uncontrolled way every year. Russia’s space agency Roscosmos told CNN the launch was operated by the Russian Ministry of Defence, which did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.īest international practice for spent rocket parts or spacecraft at the end of their life span was typically to make a controlled reentry and fall to Earth in an uninhabited area – usually a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, Krag said. The Chinese stage reentry was by DESIGN, they deliberately left it in a low orbit,” he said. “It was meant to end up in an orbit where it would stay for many thousands of years. He added that the Russian rocket stage was not intended to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere in this way. The “total mass is about the same as the Chinese stage, but most of it is probably liquid and will burn up in the atmosphere, so the risk to the ground is significantly less. While it weighed less, it was carrying about 16 tons of propellant on board, he said. The Persei booster was about 10 meters (33 feet) long compared to 32-meter (105-foot) Chinese Long March 5B rocket, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics - Harvard & Smithsonian. ![]() Webb telescope successfully unfurls its tennis court-size sunshield in space The full-scale James Webb Space Telescope model at South by Southwest in Austin. The Chinese Long March rocket was one of the largest objects in recent memory to strike the Earth after falling out of orbit, following a 2018 incident in which a piece of a Chinese space lab broke up over the Pacific Ocean and the 2020 reentry of another Long March 5B rocket. ![]() The Russian rocket part is thought to be smaller than the Chinese debris, weighing around 4 tons without fuel, compared to around 20 tons for the Chinese Long March 5B rocket, said Krag. In May 2021, NASA lambasted China for its failure to “meet responsible standards” after debris from an out-of-control rocket used to launch China’s space station plunged into the Indian Ocean. While it was highly unlikely that the rocket would cause damage or hurt anyone, “the risk is real and cannot be ignored,” Krag said. NASA will launch mission to an unexplored world in 2022Įarlier on Wednesday, the head of the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office, Holger Krag, said the Russian rocket part had been traveling at 7.5 kilometers per second (4.7 miles per second), and its reentry latitude was likely to be between 63 degrees north and south of the equator. ![]()
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