A large piece of space debris, possibly weighing several tonnes, is currently on an uncontrolled reentry phase (that is space speak for “out of control”), and parts of it are expected to crash down to Earth over the next few weeks.
If that is not worrying enough, it is impossible to predict exactly where the pieces that do not burn up in the atmosphere might land. Given the object’s orbit, the possible landing points are anywhere in a band of latitudes “a little farther north than New York, Madrid and Beijing and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand”.
The debris is part of the Long March 5B rocket that recently successfully launched China’s first module for its proposed space station. The incident comes roughly a year after another similar Chinese rocket fell to Earth, landing in the Atlantic Ocean but not before it…