Sometime in the next few hours, the body of a spent Chinese rocket will become the largest piece of space junk in decades to fall, uncontrolled, back towards Earth.
On May 5, a Long March 5B rocket launched a prototype crew capsule resembling a SpaceX Crew Dragon to orbit for a test. Now, after almost a week orbiting the Earth, the core stage of the large rocket is on a collision course with the upper atmosphere and whatever doesn’t burn up during its descent will impact the planet.
“It is the most massive object to make an uncontrolled reentry since the 39-tonne Salyut-7 in 1991,” wrote Jonathan McDowell, a prominent Harvard astrophysicist who tracks objects in orbit, on Twitter.
The US military, the private Aerospace Corporation and others are tracking the object, with the latest projections showing that the 37,000 pound rocket could enter the atmosphere and begin burning up at any moment. As of this writing, it is currently flying in the direction of the western United States and is set to fly right over Hollywood and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, according to McDowell.
Rocket re-entries are notoriously difficult to predict, as the object is moving at thousands of miles per hour. When it breaks up, debris that makes it to the ground can be spread over hundreds or thousands of miles.
The good news is that there’s almost no reports through history of space junk injuring or killing people, as it typically falls in the ocean or remote areas, which make up much of Earth’s surface.
However, it’s definitely a good idea to keep an eye on the sky today.
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