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The Long March rocket was launched on May 5 with an unmanned spacecraft
A Chinese missile weighing about 18 tons, Long March 5B, crashed on May 11 on Earth, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of West Africa. It was the fourth heaviest space “junk” to fall uncontrollably on our planet and the largest since 1991.
Before it hit Earth, the Long March rocket, which was launched on May 5 with a new unmanned spacecraft, had passed through various residential areas, such as New York’s Central Park and Los Angeles, according to CNN and Living Science.
The announcement of the rocket crash was made by astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Jonathan McDowell Center for Astrophysics.
As he said, “For a large object like this, solid parts, like parts of rocket engines, can survive the process of re-entering the atmosphere and crashing into Earth. But once they reach the lower atmosphere, they travel relatively slowly, so the worst thing that could happen is to destroy a house. “
The largest space debris on Earth were the American Skylab space station in 1979, the Skylab rocket in 1975, and the Soviet space station Salyut-7. The US space shuttle Columbia, which crashed on Earth in 2003, could also be added to the list.
In 2019, China’s nine-ton Tiangong-2 space station made a controlled drop through the atmosphere and crashed into the ocean. In 2018, the previous Chinese space station, Tiankong-1, fell out of control, but without problems in the Pacific Ocean.
Source: RES – EIA
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