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Chinese Rocket Debris May Have Fallen On Villages In The Ivory Coast After An Uncontrolled Re-Entry

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According to reports, debris from a Chinese rocket launched a week ago has fallen onto at least two villages in the Ivory Coast, following an uncontrolled re-entry of the rocket’s core stage.

On Tuesday, May 5, China’s Long March-5B launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in the Hainan province in South China. On board was an experimental crew capsule, designed to one day take humans to space and, perhaps, to the surface of the Moon.

The uncrewed spacecraft raised its orbit up to about 8,000 kilometers, before performing a high-speed re-entry and landing back on Earth – a similar demonstration mission to NASA’s Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1) of its Orion spacecraft back in 2014.

However, shortly after the launch it emerged that the empty core stage of the rocket – weighing in at nearly 18 tonnes – would perform an uncontrolled re-entry. This would make it the largest object to do so since the Soviet Union’s Salyut-7 space station in 1991, weighing 39 tonnes.

The orbital path of the core stage took it over the Atlantic Ocean, with a small possibility that it could break apart on re-entry and rain debris on the United States. However, the U.S. Air Force later said that it had re-entered over the Atlantic Ocean yesterday, Monday, 11 May.

But reports have now started to come in that some of the debris reached the Ivory Coast. Pictures posted on social media showed what appeared to be a 12-meter-long pipe originating from the rocket that had landed on the ground, which possibly originally measured about 21 meters long but may have broken in half on re-entry.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, says the timing of the incidents coupled with the villages being located under the predicted path of the Long March-5B core stage suggested they were from the rocket.

“I conclude that the objects seen in Mahounou, and at least some of the other objects from the Cote d'Ivore region whose photos are being circulated in African media, are very likely parts of the Chinese rocket stage,” McDowell wrote on Twitter.

Local reports suggested the pipe fell on a cheesemaker’s building in the Mahounou village in the Bocanda region. Another report said that a house in a village called N'guinou had also been damaged by falling debris. The cause of the debris in all the reports was not mentioned, while no casualties were reported.

An infrasound station in the Ivory Coast also recorded what appeared to be the rocket debris travelling at supersonic speeds through the atmosphere and impacting the ground, about 60 kilometers from the station itself.

The debris has not yet been confirmed as originating from the rocket, nor have China taken responsibility for the debris. But such events are not unheard of. While space debris often falls in Earth’s oceans, which cover 71 percent of our planet's surface, there have been notable exceptions.

In 1979, for example, parts of NASA’s Skylab space station fell on an unsuspecting small town called the Shire of Esperance in Australia. A ranger in the town jokingly fined NASA $400 for littering, which was paid three decades later by a radio broadcaster from California.

Its unclear what the fallout from this latest incident will be so far. Technically however, under international law, China would be liable for any damages it caused, or worse responsible for any injuries.

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