Catalonia and others autonomous communities they are closed this friday morning the air space by the uncontrolled passage of a Chinese rocket that is expected to fall into the Indian Ocean During today. The effects will last for 40 minutes: the European Aviation Safety Agency has restricted all flights from the airport of Barcelona Y Reus (Tarragona) from 09:38 a.m. and 10:18 a.m. The preventative closure It also affects the facilities in Ibiza, Aragón, and Navarra, La Rioja, and Castilla y León. China launched this Monday the fourth and last rocket Long March 5B (CZ-5B) from the Wenchang Space Launch Center, in Hainan. Like the other three, this Friday it will fall uncontrollably to the Land. Something surprising, but common, since there is no law or treaty that governs how spacecraft have to re-enter the atmosphere.
Said the risk associate for the CZ-5B space object through the Spanish airspace, they have totally restricted the flights from 09:38 to 10:18 a.m. to Catalonia and other communities.
The airports and organizations have already been informed
— Civil Protection (@emergenciescat) November 4, 2022
Final destination: Indian Ocean
As it happened at the end of last July, now the rocket has to re-enter the earth’s atmosphere. I was supposed to do this Weekendspecifically at 4:17 a.m. peninsular time on Saturday, according to calculations provided by The Aerospace Corporation. However, the latest predictions anticipate the impact: it will finally be this Friday at 12:20 p.m. in Spain. The American entity, in addition, heals in health and gives a three hour window.
“It is still too early to determine a significant debris footprint“, states The Aerospace Corporation. What is already known for sure is where will it fall. At first, the impact zone covered practically the entire planet, from the South of Europe to Africa as a whole, passing through Australia and the entire American continent from North America to the south.
chinese space station
These launches are part of the project to build the China’s first space stationwhich will be finished before the end of the year and will be called Tiangong (Heavenly Palace, in Spanish). This rocket also had a concrete mission: send the lab module Mengtian to the little one scientific city floating in space.
The coupling was a success and the Mengtian, together with the central module Tianhe and another laboratory called Wentianare already attached and the space station is shaped like the letter T. It weighs 70 tons and is expected to operate for 15 years, orbiting about 400 kilometers from the earth’s surface.
The rocket it was 17.8 meters long, had a diameter of 4.2 meters and weighed about 23.3 tons at takeoff. The artifact will weigh 20 tons when it enters the atmosphere and will largely disintegrate into space junk.
The path will be erratic and chaoticthat is why the Eurocontrol agency has warned that there will be affectations in different air spaces. Spain is not exempt from possible incidents in air traffic. Specifically, problems can last for more than an hour.
Eurocontrol reports the uncontrolled re-entry of a Chinese rocket into the atmosphere. Rate Zero has been established for certain areas of Spanish airspace and this may affect air traffic in the form of delays on the ground and route deviations in flight. pic.twitter.com/kfFBYG9s8z
— ? Air Controllers ?? (@controladores) November 4, 2022
space junk
The American space organization specifies that it will fall somewhere in the Indian Ocean and that, therefore, there is no risk to the population. As on previous occasions, it is likely that the impact zone will not be known for a few minutes before re-entry into Earth. Objects coming from space travel at speeds of up to 28,164 kilometers per hour, which means that an error of one hour in the re-entry time translates into an error of 28,164 km in the predicted location of the accident.
Our latest prediction for #CZ5B rocket body reentry is:
?04 Nov 2022 11:20 UTC ± 3 hours
Reentry will be along one of the ground tracks shown here. It is still too early to determine a meaningful debris footprint. Follow here for updates: https://t.co/KZZ9LgLk0k pic.twitter.com/GlnE8C0Iok— The Aerospace Corporation (@AerospaceCorp) November 3, 2022
Fourth runaway rocket
This will be the fourth time that a Long March 5B rocket will enter Earth from form uncontrolled. On the three previous occasions, debris fell onto a inhabited area along the west coast of Africa, in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives, and in northern Borneo. Fortunately, no one was injured or killed.
Single space station?
Related news
By 2030, China’s space station is likely to become the world’s only space station if the International Space Station dismantled as planned. That year it will cease operations and have a dramatic end: the large space module, which has been in low orbit since 1998, will fall into the Pacific Ocean and sink to the bottom of the sea in early 2031.
In recent years, the Chinese space program has achieved various successes. In 2018, a probe, Chang’e 4, landed on the hidden side of the Moon for the first time in history. Since then, he set out to conquer the Moon. In September, China discovered a new lunar mineral.