Experts have not yet been able to locate the “landing site” of the Chinese missile
last week , China
He sent a rocket into space using the first three units of his future space station directly from the Wenchang Launch Center on the equatorial island of Hainan. Now, less than a week after the event, state experts face a major problem: finding out where the debris from one of the separate spacecraft’s stages fell as they returned to Earth.
According to information from the British newspaper the Daily Mail, the vehicle responsible for the launch of the missile Rocket
, Which separates from the module after a certain altitude, has not returned to the preset center, which would lead it to descend towards the ocean, and now it will re-enter uncontrollably into the Earth’s atmosphere, which may cause a major accident in the coming days .
In an interview with Space News website, astronomer Jonathan McDowell, who has a system for monitoring objects orbiting around Terra
, Revealed that debris could reach cities in the northern hemisphere, such as New York, Madrid and Beijing, as well as sites in Chile and New Zealand: “Since the exact location is not predictable, this entire region can become a target.”
When the units of a Rocket
It pays off and returns, most of it ends up destroying the atmosphere. However, it is not uncommon for larger plots to “live” and reach land, either in populated areas or in the water. This time, the cuttings are expected to reach 30 meters in length.
“With the technologies that we currently have, it is unacceptable that we still encounter cases of unwanted re-entry into space,” McDowell said. It is difficult to estimate the total mass that will survive the operation, but it should be somewhere around “20% to 40% of the original mass”, the head of the European Space Agency’s space security program, Holger Kraj, said.
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