According to Chinese state media, fragments of China's largest rocket crashed in the Indian Ocean on Sunday, with the majority of its components lost upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, putting an end to days of speculation about where the debris will crash.

The point of effect, according to state media and the China Manned Space Engineering Office, was in the ocean west of the Maldives archipelago.

Some people have been looking skyward for debris from the Long March 5B since it launched from China's Hainan island on April 29, but the China Manned Space Engineering Office said most of the debris was burned up in the atmosphere.

Sections of the rocket re-entered the atmosphere at 10:24 a.m. Beijing time (0224 GMT) and landed at a site with a longitude 72.47 degrees east and latitude 2.65 degrees north, according to state media.

The United States Space Command announced the rocket's re-entry over the Arabian Peninsula but said it was unclear if the debris hit land or sea.

“US Space Command will not release the precise location of the impact or the duration of debris, all of which are unclear at this time,” it said in a statement on its website.

The Long March was the 5B variant's second deployment since its maiden flight in May 2020. Parts from the first Long March 5B fall on Ivory Coast last year, causing damage to many houses. There were no injuries recorded.

Experts say that since water covers the majority of the Earth's surface, the chances of a populated area on land being struck were poor, and the chances of casualties were even lower.

However, fears were fuelled by confusion about the rocket's orbital deterioration and China's inability to provide stronger guarantees in the run-up to the re-entry.

According to Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, the possible debris region may have been as far north as New York, Madrid, or Beijing, and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand, during the rocket's flight.

Since large chunks of the NASA space station Skylab dropped from orbit and landed in Australia in July 1979, most countries have used spacecraft architecture to prevent such uncontrolled re-entry, according to McDowell.

McDowell, a member of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said, "It makes the Chinese rocket designers look lazy that they didn't solve this."

Concerns that the rocket is "out of reach" and could inflict harm were dismissed as "Western hype" by the Global Times, a Chinese tabloid published by the official People's Daily.

At a daily media briefing on May 7, Wang Wenbin, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, said, "It is normal practice around the world for upper stages of rockets to burn up when reentering the atmosphere."

“To my knowledge, the upper stage of this rocket has been deactivated,” Wang said at the time, “which ensures that most of its parts will burn up upon re-entry, reducing the risk of damage to aviation or ground facilities and activities to an extremely low level.”

The rocket, which launched an unmanned Tianhe module into orbit, which will house three crew members on a permanent Chinese space station, will be followed by ten more missions to complete the station by 2022.

Heavily loaded Long March 5 rockets have played an important role in China's near-term space ambitions, from delivering modules and crew to the planned space station to launching exploratory probes to the Moon and even Mars.