Debris from a large Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean on Sunday, according to the China Manned Space Engineering Office.
early Sunday that the rocket, called the Long March 5B, had re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 a.m. Beijing time, landing at a location with coordinates of longitude 72.47 degrees east and latitude 2.65 degrees north. That would put the impact location in the Indian Ocean, west of the Maldives archipelago.
The rocket was launched on April 29 at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China's Hainan province. It measured 98 feet long and 16.5 feet wide, and it weighed 21 metric tons. Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Wang Wenbin said at a press conference Friday that it was "common practice" across the world for the upper stages of rockets to burn up while reentering the atmosphere.
On Thursday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin bemoaned the negligence involved in the rocket's fall to Earth and said Washington had no plans to shoot it down.
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