Photographs taken from the telescope show the Long March 5B (Truong Chinh 5B), China’s out-of-control missile that is expected to strike Earth this weekend.
According to Gizmodo, the image was taken by a telescope belonging to the Virtual Telescope Project on May 6.
Project member Gianluca Masi said the Long March 5B was about 700 km from the telescope at the time of filming. Due to the strong sunlight, the exposure time was adjusted to 0.5 seconds to clearly see the light trails of the rocket.
“It’s a success because our robotic system can track and photograph these objects,” said Masi.
In cooperation with Bellatrix (Italy), the online telescope project uses remotely controlled telescopes to observe extraterrestrial objects such as comets, asteroids and space debris.
This time, the system observed the Long March 5B missile, launched on April 28 to bring the Tianhe (Tianhe) module to a space station developed by China. However, instead of falling into the sea as calculated, Long March 5B circles the Earth and loses control.
According to Masi, this missile is expected to land on Earth at 10:34 p.m. on May 8 (New York time), possibly with a difference of 9 p.m. Long March 5B is 30 meters long, weighs 22.5 tons, when the fall will be equivalent to a small plane, the debris thrown 160 km.
The fast speed and unpredictable trajectory means that the time and place of the rocket’s drop cannot be calculated accurately. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (USA), believes that an hour of deviation can change the location of the fall of nearly 29,000 km.
The erratic trajectory can cause rockets to drop in residential areas such as New York (United States), Madrid (Spain), parts of Chile and New Zealand, according to SpaceNews. However, with 75% of the planet’s surface being water, along with many uninhabited soils, the likelihood of rocket debris falling where humans are inhabited is very low.
This is the second incident related to the Long March 5B missile. Last year, a 12-meter fragment of the missile crashed into a village in Côte d’Ivoire, causing damage to businesses and homes.
The launch of the Long March 5B on April 28 marked the start of 11 missile launches, carrying modules to support the construction of a China-developed space station.
