A wayward Chinese rocket reportedly rained metal debris in West Africa

By Allison Matyus May 13, 2020

A Chinese rocket that fell back down to Earth reportedly left behind metallic debris over parts of West Africa earlier this week.

China’s Long March 5B rocket launched on May 5 as a test of the experimental spacecraft. However, the rocket’s core fell into a lower orbit than expected. It fell back to Earth on Monday, May 11, scattering debris over parts of the country of Côte d’Ivoire, according to reports from local news outlets in the area.

Photo by STR / AFP via Getty Images

The Long March 5B rocket measures about 20 metric tons and is 100 feet long and 16 feet wide, making it the biggest object to make an uncontrolled re-entry to Earth since the Soviet Union’s Salyut 7 space station in 1991, according to astronomer Jonathan McDowell.

McDowell also tweeted a photo of rocket debris that landed in Cote d’Ivoire’s village of Mahounou.

Reports of a 12-m-long object crashing into the village of Mahounou in Cote d'Ivoire. It's directly on the CZ-5B reentry track, 2100 km downrange from the Space-Track reentry location. Possible that part of the stage could have sliced through the atmo that far (photo: Aminata24) pic.twitter.com/yMuyMFLfsv

— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) May 12, 2020

“I would not be surprised if several bits with masses of the order of 100 to 300kg hit the surface,” McDowell told Ars Technica in a statement. “I would be a bit surprised if anything as big as 1 metric ton did.”

The rocket was initially projected to descend upon the U.S.; its path previously predicted to pass directly over L.A. and New York City. Reports said that if the rocket had re-entered Earth’s atmosphere a mere 15 or 20 minutes earlier, the debris could very well have fallen on America’s two largest cities.

China previously launched an earlier version of the rocket, called Long March-5, in December, where it carried a Shijian-20 satellite into geostationary transfer orbit. That rocket was designed to carry up to eight tons into Earth-Moon transfer orbit, or up to five tons into Earth-Mars transfer orbit.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Former Digital Trends Contributor

Allison Matyus is a general news reporter at Digital Trends. She covers any and all tech news, including issues around social…

Space

Starliner spacecraft just took a major step toward first crewed flight

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft being stacked on the Atlas V rocket.

A crane lifts the Starliner spacecraft to the top of an Atlas V rocket. Boeing Space

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft has been stacked atop the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket ahead of its first crewed flight next month.

Space

NASA needs a new approach for its challenging Mars Sample Return mission

An illustration of NASA's Sample Return Lander shows it tossing a rocket in the air like a toy from the surface of Mars.

NASA has shared an update on its beleaguered Mars Sample Return mission, admitting that its previous plan was too ambitious and announcing that it will now be looking for new ideas to make the mission happen. The idea is to send a mission to collect samples from the surface of Mars and return them to Earth for study. It's been a long-term goal of planetary science researchers, but one that is proving costly and difficult to put into practice.

The Perseverance rover has already collected and sealed a number of samples of Mars rock as it journeys around the Jezero Crater, and has left these samples in a sample cache ready to be collected. However, getting them back to Earth in the previous plan required sending a vehicle to Mars, getting it to land on the surface, sending out another rover to collect the samples and bring them back, launching a rocket from the planet's surface (something which has never been done before), and then having this rocket rendezvous with another spacecraft to carry them back to Earth. That level of complexity was just too much to be feasible within a reasonable budget, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson announced this week.

Space

Final communications sent to the beloved Ingenuity Mars helicopter

NASA’s Ingenuity Mars helicopter is seen here in a close-up taken by Mastcam-Z, a pair of zoomable cameras aboard the Perseverance rover. This image was taken on April 5, the 45th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.

Earlier this year, the beloved Mars helicopter Ingenuity ended its mission after an incredible 72 flights. Originally designed as a technology test intended to perform just five flights, NASA's helicopter was the first rotorcraft to fly on another planet and was such a success that it has already inspired plans for more exploration of distant planets using rotorcraft. Its mission came to an end, however, when it damaged one of its rotors, leaving it unable to safely fly.

Even then, the helicopter was still able to communicate by sending signals to the nearby Perseverance rover, which acted as its base station. Now, though, Perseverance is traveling away from the helicopter to continue its exploration of Mars. So this week, the NASA team on the ground met for the last time to communicate with Ingenuity, bringing the mission to a final close.