China rocket will crash sooner than expected, US Space Force predicts – follow live

The European Space Agency’s latest – and last – prediction has arrived.

It shows that it expects the re-entry to occur at 3.15am, UTC. But there is window of 9 hours and 25 minutes – meaning it could happen any time between Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon.

Because of that large window, and the high speed of the spacecraft, it is impossible to say where that re-entry will happen, or where any parts of the object might fall. Even eight hours before the re-entry, any prediction of location can be as much as “two earth resolutions” out, the space agency notes.

Last night, UK time, China launched an older rocket up to space to put some satellites into orbit.

Luckily, the Chang Zheng 2C won’t come back down for a couple of decades, and the rocket is a lot smaller so sould be safer when it does.

Since it will run until the early hours of Sunday morning, the Saturday Night Live show with Elon Musk will happen during that window. And the New York studios of SNL are within the range, as noted by expert Jonathan McDowell.

But he notes that the rocket is not likely to fall on the set: the rocket appears to be over the South Pacific during the monologue, he notes.

The US’s projected re-entry shows the rocket coming back down sometime between 2pm on Saturday after and 8am on Sunday morning. (That’s UTC, so the same as GMT; you can add an hour to get the time in the UK, or subtract four to get the time on the US west coast.)

As well as the aforementioned giant claw, Japan is testing wooden satellites to clean up space wreckage.

Sumitomo Forestry, a Japan-based wood processing company, said they have begun researching on an ideal wood material for space.

The satellites could burn up when they plunge back to Earth without releasing harmful substances into the atmosphere, and could be ready as soon as 2023.

Scientists have attempted to map what would happen if an asteroid or other kind of object crashed to Earth. It does not end well.

There is currently no technology on Earth that could stop a massive asteroid from wiping out Europe.

Simulations carried out by space agencies concluded that such a catastrophe would be unavoidable, even given six months to prepare.

“If confronted with the scenario in real life, we would not be able to launch any spacecraft on such short notice with current capabilities,” the agencies said.

The European Space Agency will be sending a huge claw into space in order to remove buildup of space debris that has been accumulating around the planet.

The ClearSpace-1 mission will target the Vespa (Vega Secondary Payload Adapter), which was left in orbit after the second flight of Vega in 201.

The agency is using a Swiss start-up, called ClearSpace SA, to perform the task. It is expected to launch its mission in 2025.

Rocket launches have placed about 10,680 satellites in Earth’s orbit since 1957, around 6,250 of these are still in space, but only 3,700 are still functioning.

In March 2021, a new satellite mission sought to collect the debris was started.

The End-of-Life Services by Astroscale demonstration (ELSA-d) will be operated from the In-Orbit Servicing Control Centre – National Facility at the Satellite Applications Catapult (SAC) at Harwell Campus in Oxfordshire. It will begin demonstration sin June or July 2021.

There are currently an estimated 200,000 objects between 0.4 and 4 inches, and tens of thousands of objects larger than 4 inches, according to the United States Space Surveillance Network.