But feel free to be annoyed that we need to worry at all, for McDowell, Shouppe and Muelhaupt all stressed that the coming crash was very avoidable. Indeed, there's a "99.5% chance that nothing will happen," Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant with The Aerospace Corporation's Corporate Chief Engineer’s Office, said during yesterday's discussion. And even a fall over terra firma is unlikely to result in injuries or infrastructure damage, given that most people live in big metropolitan areas that are separated by many miles of open space. For example, the Long March 5B core is likely to reenter over water, because oceans cover more than 70% of Earth's surface. We can make some educated guesses about the rocket crash, however, based solely on geography. China lays out big plans for its new Tiangong space station Huge Chinese rocket booster falls to Earth over Arabian Peninsula Kessler Syndrome and the space debris problem "And since we don't know exactly how that's tumbling, we can't model that exactly." The rocket body appears to be "tumbling in some fashion, meaning that there's a constantly sort of varying amount of drag that's put on it," Matthew Shouppe, senior director for commercial space at the California-based tracking company LeoLabs, said during yesterday's discussion. "And so that makes it impossible to predict exactly at what point the satellite will have plowed through enough atmosphere to melt and break up and finally reenter," added McDowell, who's based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.Īnd the Long March 5B core isn't taking a smooth, predictable path through the upper atmosphere, further complicating forecasting attempts. "The snag is that the density of the upper atmosphere varies with time there's actually weather up there," astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell said during a discussion about the coming Long March 5B crash that The Aerospace Corporation livestreamed on Twitter yesterday (July 28). This imprecision is no indictment of space junk researchers and satellite trackers forecasting such debris falls is just really, really hard. EDT +/- 1 hour on Jas estimated by Aerospace Corp. This graphic shows the most likely location of the reentry of China's Long March 5B rocket stage in the north Pacific Ocean at 12:15 p.m.
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