A large segment of a Chinese rocket re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and disintegrated over the Indian Ocean on Sunday, the Chinese space agency said, following fevered speculation over where the 18-tonne object would come down. Officials in Beijing had said there was little risk from the freefalling segment of the Long March-5B rocket, which had launched the first module of China’s new space station into Earth orbit on April 29.

“After monitoring and analysis, at 10:24 on May 9, 2021, the last-stage wreckage of the Long March 5B Yao-2 launch vehicle has re-entered the atmosphere,” the China Manned Space Engineering Office said in a statement, providing coordinates for a point in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives. It added that most of the segment disintegrated and was destroyed during re-entry.

Monitoring service Space-Track, which uses US military data, also confirmed the re-entry. “Everyone else following the #LongMarch5B re-entry can relax. The rocket is down,” it tweeted. “We believe the rocket went down in the Indian Ocean, but are waiting on official data from @18SPCS,” it added in a separate tweet, referring to a squadron of the US Space Force.

The segment’s descent matched predictions by some experts that any debris would have splashed down into the ocean, given that 70 percent of the planet is covered by water. But the uncontrolled re-entry of such a large object had sparked concerns about possible damage and casualties, despite there being a low statistical chance. “The probability of causing harm on the ground is extremely low,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said last week.