Remnants from the Chinese rocket that had started to hurtle back towards Earth have landed in the Indian Ocean.
Per BBC News, China's space agency confirmed that debris from the 18-ton rocket had landed just west of the Maldives on Sunday, May 9, following speculation about where on Earth it may land.
The so-called Long March-5b re-entered our planet's atmosphere at 10:24AM Beijing time. There have been no reports of casualties.
The precise coordinates of the landed was at a point 72.47° East and 2.65° North, BBC News states.
Per the New York Post, the crash zone was anywhere as north as New York, and as far south as Chile, but experts had stated that the chances of human injury were low.
Speaking of the uncontrolled re-entry, Harvard-based astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell said, per the Post: "It makes the Chinese rocket designers look lazy that they didn’t address this."
However, Wang Wenbin of the Chinese foreign ministry said it was "common practice across the world" for sections of space crafts to "burn up while reentering the atmosphere".
The Long March-5B rocket launched the Tianhe module - part of China's future space station - on 29 April in south China's Hainan Province.
BBC News states that the 10-story-high Long March-5b core stage started to lose height after originally reaching an elliptical orbit approximately 160km by 375km above the Earth's surface.
Debris from the first Long March 5B rocket caused damage to some building last year after raining down in the Ivory Coast in western Africa.
Per The New York Times, Dr. Jonathan McDowell - a scientist at the Cambridge Center for Astrophysics -stated that the recent landing of the rocket was, in his opinion, "negligent" and "irresponsible."
"China is an outlier in the way countries have been disposing of rocket parts for 30 years. They just decided: 'Hey, the Earth is big. This probably won't affect anyone,'" McDowell told Time magazine.
"The fact that [China] let the core stage go into orbit reflects a lack of caring. They really do have to get with the 21st century," he added.