The wreckage of China’s Long March 5B Remote 2 rocket crashed into the Indian Ocean waters today. According to the location provided by the Chinese side, the wreckage fell in the sea southwest of Maldives, only about 42 kilometers from the nearest inhabited island, which still has a certain degree of danger.
CCTV reported that the China Manned Space Engineering Office announced at noon that the wreckage of the Long March 5B Remote 2 rocket had fallen into the Indian Ocean at 2.65 degrees north latitude and 72.47 degrees east longitude at 10:24 a.m. Taipei time after monitoring. The vast majority of the device was burned up during re-entry into the atmosphere before falling into the sea.
According to the chart, the location of the rocket wreckage announced by the Chinese side is off the southwest of Dhaalu Atoll in the southwest of Maldives. Dhaalu Atoll is one of the well-known tourist islands in the Maldives.
Dhaalu Atoll consists of 56 islands, 7 of which are permanently inhabited, while others are used exclusively for hotels. A comparison shows that the wreckage of the Long March 5B Yaoji rocket landed only about 42 kilometers from the nearest inhabited island, Gadifuri, which is used exclusively for resort hotels.
At the same time, Gadifuri Island is less than 5 km from Kudahuvadhoo Island, the largest island in Dalu Atoll, which has permanent residents and the only airport for tourists to access; and Kudahuvadhoo Island is only nearly 46 km from the surface of the wreckage.
By general definition, a sea surface of more than 40 kilometers from land is still considered “near sea”, and it is an inhabited land. Compared to the wreckage from rocket launches in other countries, the crash location is usually set in remote waters hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away from the nearest land, such as the southeast Pacific Ocean, which is known as the “graveyard of space”.
In contrast, the wreckage of the Long March 5B Yaoji rocket fell into the sea only 40 km or so from land, possibly at a fishing vessel operation site or a commercial vessel passing through, which still poses a certain degree of danger.
In fact, there have been cases of Chinese rockets crashing on land, and the wreckage of a Long March 5B rocket launched in May 2020 crashed into a village inland on the Ivory Coast of Africa, causing damage to several buildings and including a 12-meter-long metal pipeline, but fortunately no one was injured.
Before that, the 76-ton wreckage of the U.S. Skylab space station crashed into the eastern waters of the Indian Ocean and remote land in western Australia in 1979, and no one was killed or injured.
U.S. astrophysicist McDowell (Jonathan McDowell) recently said that since 1990, no more than 10 tons of space debris uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere, and the net weight of the Long March 5 B remote two rocket, has reached 21 tons.
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