People’s Republic of China (PRC) Long March 5B (CZ-5B) has re-entered the Indian Ocean at approx. 10:45 am MDT on the 30th of July, 2022.
The Chinese rocket lit up the sky as it disintegrated over Malaysia’s Kuching city. The rocket was launched on July 24 but on Saturday it fell back to Earth and landed in the Indian Ocean.
A Twitter user shared a video of the sky lit up in Kuching and captioned it as “Meteor spotted on Kuching! #Jalanbako 31/07/2022”
meteor spotted in kuching! #jalanbako 31/7/2022 pic.twitter.com/ff8b2zI2sw
— Nazri sulaiman (@nazriacai) July 30, 2022
The US Space Command, which also reported that the Long March 5B rocket re-entered over the Indian Ocean at about 12:45 p.m. EDT on Saturday, confirmed the rocket’s destruction.
Beijing allegedly failed to deliver the “precise trajectory information” needed to identify the likely sites of falling debris, according to NASA.
The rocket body is expected to shatter as it enters the atmosphere, but because it is so large, many pieces will likely survive a catastrophic re-entry and rain debris over a region that is roughly 2,000 km (1,240 miles) long by 70 km. Analysts predicted this week that the rocket body would shatter as it entered the atmosphere (44 miles).
Experts tried to determine the direction of the massive rocket’s irregular re-entry.
