Out-of-control space junk weighing 18 tons passed over LA then NYC before crashing
A piece of a rocket that weighed nearly 18 tons uncontrollably blasted through Earth’s atmosphere Monday and splashed into the Atlantic Ocean, media outlets reported.
The rocket, which China launched about a week ago, is the largest piece of space junk to fall from the galaxy since 1991 when the 39-tonne Salyut-7 spacecraft flew over Argentina and landed in the nearby ocean, astronomer Jonathan McDowell noted on Twitter.
McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tracked the rocket as it aimlessly soared across the sky.
What’s more, officials tracking the object weren’t sure where it would land for hours, as the backbone of the rocket — called the core stage — flew over Los Angeles and Central Park in New York City, CNN reported.
China launched the unmanned Long-March-5B rocket into orbit May 5 from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province and is now the fourth largest piece of space debris to fall to Earth, the outlet said.
“For a large object like this, dense pieces like parts of the rocket engines could survive reentry and crash to Earth,” McDowell told CNN. “Once they reach the lower atmosphere they are traveling relatively slowly, so worst case is they could take out a house.”
“The problem is that it is traveling very fast horizontally through the atmosphere and it’s hard to predict when it will finally come down,” he said.
About 200 to 400 tracked objects break through Earth’s atmosphere every year, which equals about one piece of uninvited space junk every day, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Most of the old satellites, pieces of rocket and shards from collisions that reach Earth are less than 1mm in size, which is smaller than a grain of sand and cannot be detected with sensor technology.
About 30,000 of those “are larger than a softball,” and “only about 1,000 are actual spacecraft,” NOAA said.
Even the grains of sand-size objects can wreak havoc because of how fast they travel. It’s “faster than a bullet, which means the debris can easily punch through the protective covering on satellites or spacecraft,” the agency said.
But like what happened with the recent Chinese rocket, objects that survive the boiling journey from space to Earth usually always land in the ocean because they cover about 70% of earth’s surface.
The United States Air Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron confirmed the space junk’s reentry on Twitter.
This story was originally published May 12, 2020 at 11:54 AM with the headline "Out-of-control space junk weighing 18 tons passed over LA then NYC before crashing."
