Debris from a recent Chinese rocket re-entry has reportedly been found close to several villages in Malaysia and Indonesia.
The uncontrolled descent of the 30-meter-tall, 5-meter-wide Long March 5B core stage followed its mission last week to transport the second of three modules to China’s new space station in low-Earth orbit.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Astrophysics Center at Harvard University, on Monday shared what he described as “convincing” reports of rocket debris landing in Borneo, on both the Indonesian and Malaysian sides of the border. But the same news report gives a shot of something that is CLEARLY a large part of the reentered stage, in Balaikarangan in W Kalimantan pic.twitter.com/D3svNTv2TF First-stage boosters usually burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere after they’ve done their job of powering the second stage and its payload to orbit. But larger boosters, like China’s Long March 5B, can fail to completely burn up, sending debris hurtling toward Earth.
He said the nation’s space agency had failed to share specific trajectory information for the first-stage booster’s descent, adding: “All spacefaring nations should follow established best practices, and do their part to share this type of information in advance to allow reliable predictions of potential debris impact risk, especially for heavy-lift vehicles, like the Long March 5B, which carry a significant risk of loss of life and property.
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