China’s Long March 5B rocket took off from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Hainan on July 24. It was delivered successfully to Wentien lab to low earth orbit and docked with China’s Tiangong space station around 13 hours later. As is the case with previous launches, the core stage, which doesn’t have controlled reentry provisions, entered into a quickly deteriorating earth’s orbit. 

This 25-ton core stage will now make an uncontrolled re-entry.

When will it crash land

The Aerospace Corporation, which is tracking the debris, has now estimated that it will crash land on July 30 at 23:21 UTC (7:21 p.m. ET), with a plus-minus of 16 hours.

“For tracking and predicting reentries, our team uses public data sets that are generated when an object being tracked passes over one of a collection of sensors across the planet”, an official reported to Gizmodo. 

Where will it crash land

For now, an exact location hasn’t been pinpointed, but scientists are going with a range from 41 degrees north and 41 degrees south latitude. 

“It is still too early to determine a meaningful debris footprint”, the company had said in a tweet. 

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Meanwhile, a statement from them reads, “Due to the uncontrolled nature of its descent, there is a non-zero probability of the surviving debris landing in a populated area—over 88 percent of the world’s population lives under the reentry’s potential debris footprint”. 

As per the Aerospace Corporation, objects of this size don’t normally burn up completely in the atmosphere, and 20% to 40% of the total mass of the object is likely to reach earth. 

What happens with core stages and what’s China’s problem

Core stages don’t usually enter the earth’s orbit and are remotely guided into oceans or over sparsely populated areas. However, China’s rockets seem to have a continuing problem with their core stages. 

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One fell onto an inhabited area on the West Coast of Africa, while the more recent one crashed into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives. No one was hurt in either case, but it’s raised concerns about China’s practices.