There is concern about the fall of the remains of the Chinese rocket ‘Long March 5B’, That is why the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) warns in a release which may fall this weekend in southern Europe. as estimated from European Space Surveillance and Trackingthe drop will take place on Sunday, July 31 at approximately 02:53.
⚠️Update: our latest autonomous predictions show that the re-entry window of object CZ-5B is 2022-07-31 02:53:14 UTC ±480 min. #EUSST will keep observing the object and performing analyses; stay tuned for more updates.
Readmore: https://t.co/b7Ja0QuSIz #CZ5B #LongMarch5B pic.twitter.com/VZNKoRS4NL
— EUSST (@EU_SST) July 29, 2022
This is combined with a published study in Nature Astronomy indicating that there is about a 10 percent chance of one or more casualties from falling rocket debris and they are most likely to be in the Global South.
In the study, titled “Unnecessary Risks Created by Uncontrolled Rocket Entries,” researchers led by Dr. Michael Byers, a professor in the department of political science at the University of British Columbia, say governments must take action and require that rockets are guided back to Earth after use instead of falling wildly.
The team of researchers, which included the Canada Research Chair in Planetary Astronomy at UBC, Dr. Aaron Boley and two students, used more 30 years of data a public catalog of satellites to calculate the potential risk that uncontrolled re-entries of the rocket body have on human life in the next ten years.
«Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City, Bogota and Lagos are at least three times more likely than Washington, DC, New York, Beijing and Moscow to have a rocket body re-enter on them, based on the current population of rocket bodies in orbit,” the document states.
According to NASAabout 80 percent of the world’s population lives in “unprotected or lightly protected structures that provide limited protection from falling debris.”
The study adds, “one could imagine someone in a mega city in the Global South or in a rural area in a developing country being mysteriously killed by a small piece of metal falling from the sky. Is it going to report as a piece of rocket body? Will the global media find out about that development? I mean, the point here is that we’re talking about an absence of reported deaths.”
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