upper stage Perseus for a Russian missile Angara A5 It collided with Earth in an uncontrolled manner yesterday evening Italian time, reaching the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean at 21:08 UTC (22:08 in Italy).
“Percy’s return confirmed: 21:08 UTC at 121 West 14s in the South Pacific,The astronomer confirmed via Twitter Jonathan McDowell, Dale Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
The longitude/latitude location corresponds to Extension of the sea east of French Polynesia.
Percy’s flight ended 9 days into the flight: she suffered a block with a dummy payload during a test conducted last December 27. Apparently Percy was unable to restart as planned to start the second engine, which should have sent him from low Earth orbit to a much higher geostationary position.
Percy was a fairly large space wreck. At takeoff, here on Earth, it weighed about 19.5 tons, but most of it was propulsion: The fuel may have been dumped while the stadium was in orbit, so the piece that landed probably weighed about 3.2 tons, according to Anatoly Zak of RussianSpaceWeb.com.
Almost certainly most of the rocket burned up in Earth’s atmosphereAccording to McDowell, who analyzed the available tracking data.
“Any damage from any debris will be insignificant (it may affect the roof of some unfortunate, but it will not wipe out humanity), McDowell wrote on Twitter before confirming the return.
McDowell was responding to a tweet from a user who asked him if the Percy accident would be similar to the scenario presented in “do not search “, which tells the story of two astronomers trying to warn people of a large comet on its way to Earth (the film is mostly satirical and the upcoming comet is a metaphor for climate change and humanity’s inadequate response to its disastrous effects).
Everyone will remember what happened in may be 2021, a controversial example of re-entry into unwanted space, the central stage of 23 tons of Chinese booster The long walk 5 bthat fell into orbit around the Earth 10 days later.
On April 28, the carrier successfully put the central module of China’s new space station into orbit, becoming a piece of junk space rather than diving into the ocean soon after liftoff, as is usually the case with boosters on most launches. Hence the controversy.
The launch on December 27 was the third test flight of the Angara A5, the development of which was affected by a number of delays. The first two heavy lift launches, which took place in December 2014 and December 2020, successfully carried the payloads into the desired orbit.
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