Catalonia and others autonomous communities from the northern half of spain they are closed this friday morning the airspace by the uncontrolled passage of a cohete chino Long March 5B, which has finally fallen in an area of the South Pacific Ocean at 11:01 a.m., peninsular time. The national air navigation manager Enaire has followed the recommendations of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) and has restricted All flights of the airports of Barcelona y Girona – Costa Brava from 9:38 a.m. to 10:18 a.m. The preventative closure it has also affected the infrastructures of Ibiza, Aragón, and Navarra, La Rioja, and Castilla y León.
Air traffic has been restored at the scheduled time, but the affectations will be prolonged in El Prat airport – Barcelona throughout the day in the form of delays. Until noon, 157 passenger and cargo flights of the 759 scheduled for today have suffered delays, Enaire has detailed. in the infrastructure of Girona – Costa Brava, two operations have had delays of an hour and a half. Reus, for its part, has not suffered any setbacks because its operations did not coincide with the altered time slot.
There are no laws governing re-entries into the atmosphere
China launched this Monday the fourth and last rocket Long March 5B (CZ-5B) from the Wenchang Space Launch Center, in Hainan. Like the other three, this Friday he has re-entered the earth’s atmosphere in an uncontrolled way. Something surprising, but usual, since there is no law or treaty that governs how space artifacts have to re-enter the Tierra. In fact, it is not the first time that the world has held its breath due to the uncontrolled fall of a space rocket.
Final destination: South Pacific Ocean
The area affected by the rocket’s trajectory has involved much of the northern half of the Iberian Peninsulafrom the coast of Mediterranean Sea until the Atlantic Ocean. In this line, the airport of Lisboa It has also temporarily ceased operations as a preventive measure.
“The uncontrolled entry into the atmosphere of the Chinese space object has been monitored at all times by different national and international organizations and institutions,” he said. Enaire after the events have occurred. Until then, the only authority that had warned of the restriction of the returned had been Civil Protection of the Generalitat de Catalunya, who made a tweet at 9:07 a.m.
Due to the risk associated with the passage of the CZ-5B space object crossing Spanish airspace, flights have been completely restricted from 09:38 to 10:18 hours in Catalonia and other communities.
Airports and organizations have already been informed
— Civil protection (@emergenciescat) November 4, 2022
The rocket was scheduled to enter the Earth’s atmosphere this Weekendspecifically at 4:17 a.m. peninsular time on Saturday, according to calculations provided by The Aerospace Corporation. Initially, the impact zone covered practically the entire planet, from the on from Europa to Africa as a whole, passing through Australia and the entire American continent from North America to the south.
However, the latest predictions of the american corporation They advanced the re-entry and placed it at 12:20 p.m. in Spain this Friday with a margin of error of three hours. The final destination, the Indian Ocean. However, these estimates have not been fulfilled either, since it has finally fallen into the South Pacific.
Large Space Junk Footprint
The AESA has reported that the remains of the Long March 5B they are one of the most space debris largest recorded to date. The european agency has specified that the artifact weighed between 17 and 23 tons and had a size of 30 metros at the time of reentry. Therefore, he has warned that dropping the space junk in an uncontrolled manner “deserves careful monitoring”.
Eurocontrol reports the uncontrolled re-entry of a Chinese rocket into the atmosphere. Rate Zero has been established for certain areas of Spanish airspace and this may affect air traffic in the form of delays on the ground and route deviations in flight. pic.twitter.com/kfFBYG9s8z
— ????Air Controllers ???????? (@controladores) November 4, 2022
China’s first space station
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The four launches of the CZ-5B were part of the project to build the China’s first space stationwhich will be finished before the end of the year and will be called Tiangong (Heavenly Palace, in Spanish). This rocket also had a concrete mission: send the lab module Mengtian to the little one scientific city floating in space.
The coupling was a success and the Mengtian, together with the central module Tianhe and another laboratory called Wentianare already attached and the space station has a shape of letter T. Total weight 70 tons and it is expected to operate for 15 years in a low orbit, about 400 kilometers from the Earth’s surface.