Long March 5B Rocket Crash Site - May 9, 2021

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Parts of the China's 'out-of-control' Long March 5B rocket re-entered the atmosphere and landed on May 9 2021 at a location with the coordinates longitude 72.47 degrees east and latitude 2.65 degrees north (02°65′ N - 72°47′ E), Chinese state media cited the China Manned Space Engineering Office as saying.

The coordinates put the point of impact in the ocean, west of the Maldives archipelago. Most of the debris was burnt up in the atmosphere, it said. Debris from the Long March 5B has had some people looking warily skyward since shortly after it blasted off from China's Hainan island on April 29.

The first flight of the 5B variant ("Y1 mission") carried an uncrewed prototype of China's future deep space crewed spacecraft, and, as a secondary payload, the Flexible Inflatable Cargo Re-entry Vehicle. The Y1 mission was launched on 5 May 2020, at 10:00 UTC from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in Hainan Island. CASC declared the launch a success after the payloads were placed in low Earth orbit.

The flight's secondary payload, the experimental cargo return craft, malfunctioned during its return to Earth on 6 May 2020. Nevertheless, the return capsule of the prototype next-generation crewed spacecraft, the flight's primary payload, successfully landed in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region at 05:49 UTC, on 8 May 2020.

The prototype spacecraft flew in orbit for two days and 19 hours and carried out a series of successful experiments and technological verifications. The Y1 mission's core stage may have been the most massive object to make an uncontrolled re-entry since the Soviet Union's Salyut 7 space station in 1991 and the United States' Skylab in 1979, excluding the failed controlled reentry of Space Shuttle Columbia over populated areas of the Continental United States in 2003

The US Space command confirmed the re-entry of the rocket over the Arabian Peninsula, but said it was unknown if the debris hit land or water. The Long March launch last week was the second deployment of the 5B variant since its maiden flight in May 2020. Last year, pieces from the first Long March 5B fell on Ivory Coast, damaging several buildings. No injuries were reported.

"Spacefaring nations must minimise the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximise transparency regarding those operations," NASA administrator said in a statement after the re-entry. "It is clear that China is failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris."

With most of the Earth's surface covered by water, the odds of a populated area on land being hit had been low, and the likelihood of injuries even lower, according to experts. But uncertainty over the rocket's orbital decay and China's failure to issue stronger reassurances in the run-up to the re-entry fuelled anxiety.

During the rocket's flight, the potential debris zone could have been as far north as New York, Madrid or Beijing, and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand. Ever since large chunks of the NASA space station Skylab fell from orbit in July 1979 and landed in Australia, most countries have sought to avoid such uncontrolled re-entries through their spacecraft design.