There was initial confusion at our newsroom as accounts came in of lights in the sky on the night of Monday to Tuesday at around 12:30 – 1:00, which some described as fireworks, a comet or a meteorite.
They were the remains of a Chinese rocket disintegrating as it entered the atmosphere, and which was sighted from the provinces of Cádiz, Granada, Seville and Málaga, the Canary Islands, Ciudad Real and Madrid. It was space debris, part of a Chinese Chang Zheng 2F rocket burning up in the atmosphere, according to ‘Frontera Espacial’, which had warned several hours earlier that this phenomenon might occur.
What is a CZ-2F rocket?
CZ-2F rockets are used in crewed missions of the Astronaut Corps of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. It is a Chinese space rocket of the Long March family, made up of four additional side boosters and a main central body.
The one we saw last night partly disintegrating belonged to the Shenzhou-14 mission, which set off on 5 June 2022 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre, successfully carrying three astronauts to the Tiangong space station in low Earth orbit.
Shenzhou-14 is China’s ninth crewed space mission, and its aim is to complete the construction of its space station, which in its first phase will have a central module (in orbit since April 2021) and two laboratories (whose launches are planned for July and October 2022).
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