Chinese rocket tracker - live: Falling spacecraft falls to Earth over Indian Ocean, reports say

It’s a big day for things going into and out of orbit. After last night’s SpaceX Starlink launch, the company will be launching another set of satellites overnight. (At 2.42am eastern time, by which point the rocket should have done its re-entry.)

Last night’s launch is still floating overhead, and people are reporting seeing them as they pass by. If you’d like to try yourself, here’s a website that helps you find them.

Here’s your latest prediction from the Aerospace Corporation:

(That orange circle, by the way, is the rough area that might be able to see re-entry as it happens.)

The new window gives new predictions for where the re-entry might happen. But again, this doesn’t really mean anything: that’s the middle of the window, but even missing that by a few minutes would be enough to wildly change the location – and there is currently a four hour window.

The new and smaller window also narrows own the places it might find. We’re still a lot further from knowing where it will fall – but we know where it might fall, and where it might not. Here are some of those places, courtesy of Jonathan McDowell.

We’ve got a new window from the US Space Force (or specifically the 18 Space Control Squadron).

It’s now expected at 2.04am UTC, with a 60 minutes window either side. So that’s somewhere between 1.04am and 3.04am UTC.

That’s 2.04am-4.04am UK time. Or 9.04pm-11.04pm on the east coast of the US.

Or just over five hours until the middle of the window.

There is nothing much to report by way of estimates; it remains the case that the re-entry is expected early Sunday morning, UK time.

Most estimates come in around 2.30am UTC, though different organisations are more or less convinced about how wide the window around that time might be. (The Space Force’s is three hours either way at the moment; the EU’s is 2.5 hours.)

The Aerospace Corporation’s estimate is a little later, but its window is larger too, and it hasn’t been updated as recently.

You can expect the windows to narrow – and the different sources to coalesce – as the rocket gets closer.

Space-Track, which has been collating the official US information, said that it was expecting its next update about 10pm UK time. It will probably narrow down the range a little more.

The most recent estimate shows the rocket re-entering around 2.27am UTC, give or take three hours. (So somewhere between 12.27am and 6.27am UK time; in the US, between 7.27pm and 1.27am.)

(That comes from 18 Space Control Squadron, which works to track artificial objects in orbit around the Earth.)

In this image, provided by the same EU team as below, you can see the rocket as it streaks across the sky.

The European Union’s Space Surveillance and Tracking team have provided their last update, and their final estimate of time.

The rocket is expected to arrive at around 2.30 UTC, they say, give or take about two and a half hours.

(As ever, that window is far too large to predict where it will land with any kind of accuracy, but its announcement also gives some possibilities.)

Here’s a nice visualisation of where the data from the US Space Force suggests the re-entry could happen. The red bits are the key ones – and as you can see, they’re mostly over oceans, thankfully, though Australia in particular is covered by some.

Jonathan McDowell is one of the true heroes of the re-entry of Long March 5B – cataloguing it, informing the world, and taking part in a host of interviews to let people know just how worried they should be. (Not very.) Here he is, preparing for the arrival and wearing a very fitting shirt:

If you’d like to hear more from him, have a look here, at our in-depth video interview.