A Long March 5B rocket’s core stage is just hours away from making an uncontrolled descent and crashing onto the earth’s surface. 

On July 24, China launched the Long March 5B spacecraft, carrying the Wentien module to the nation’s Tiangong space station. The core stage, as forecast and feared, entered a rapidly degrading elliptical Earth orbit and is now set to make an uncontrolled descent into the atmosphere.

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The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital Reentry and Debris Studies (CORDS) is monitoring the situation and providing regular updates. The 25-ton rocket body is expected to enter Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday, July 30, at 6:26 p.m. UTC (2:26 p.m. ET), with an error range of plus-minus 6 hours.

The white line and dark area on The Aerospace Corporation’s map show the day/night boundary around the world. The blue lines depict the object’s orbital route before reentry, while the yellow lines depict the booster’s estimated future course (each tick mark is a five-minute interval). The text label indicates where the object is expected to land, while the orange circle indicates the range of the booster’s reentry.

These are tentative estimates that will change as we get closer to the time of entry. Even still, as Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in an interview with Gizmodo last year, “a one-hour error in the reentry time is an 18,000-mile error in the location.”

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When the incident occurs, it usually takes a few hours for monitoring stations to broadcast the exact time and location of the collision.

Normally, core stages do not reach orbit and are guided into uninhabited places like as the ocean, however this is not the case in this case. This looks to be the pattern with Long March 5B rockets, as two prior launches in 2020 and 2021 ended in identical uncontrolled reentries.

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According to the Aerospace Corporation, up to 20% to 40% of objects of this size will reach the ground, however, the chances of being hit and harmed by reentering debris are fewer than one in a trillion. It’s thus exceedingly unlikely, but not improbable, that the 100-foot-long (30-meter) rocket body may kill, injure, or damage property, and it appears that China’s space agency is betting on those slim chances.

“The spread of debris, referred to as the ‘debris footprint,’ is not something experts can speculate on at this time, given the degree of uncertainty remaining for the reentry point,” The Aerospace Corporation claims Previous uncontrolled reentries of the Long March 5B resulted in debris falling along Africa’s west coast and into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives.