Debris from Chinese missiles has crashed into Earth over the Indian and Pacific oceans, US and Chinese officials say.

China's space agency said most of the debris from the Long March 5 rocket had burned up in the atmosphere, identifying the Sulu Sea in the Pacific as the re-entry location.

Earlier, space experts had said that the probability of the missile landing in a populated area was extremely low.

The uncontrolled return of the rocket's core stage has raised questions about liability for space debris.

There have previously been calls from NASA for the Chinese space agency to design rockets that break up into smaller pieces upon re-entry, as is the international norm.

He referred his readers to the Chinese authorities for more details.

Meanwhile, China's space agency gave the re-entry coordinates as 119 degrees east longitude and 9.1 degrees north latitude. This corresponds to an area in the Sulu Sea - east of the Philippine island of Palawan in the North Pacific.

The last rockets heading to China's unfinished space station, known as Tiangong, lack the capability for a controlled re-entry.

The last launch was last Sunday, when the Long March 5 rocket delivered a laboratory module to the Tiangong station. The Chinese government said on Wednesday that the missile's re-entry would pose little risk to anyone on the ground as it would most likely land in the sea.

However, there was a possibility that parts of the missile could land on a populated area, as happened in May 2020 when property was damaged in Côte d'Ivoire.

Before impact, the rocket's empty body was in an elliptical orbit around Earth, where it was being pulled toward an uncontrolled reentry.

Designing objects to break up with atmospheric reentry is becoming a priority for satellite operators. It is made in part using materials that have low melting temperatures, such as aluminum.

In the case of rockets, this can be expensive, as historically the materials used for fuel, such as titanium, require very high temperatures to burn. The sheer size of such objects is also a problem, especially in the case of Long March 5, which weighs over 25 tons.

The same Long March 5 configuration has launched twice before, once in May 2020 and again in May 2021, carrying different elements of the Tiangong station.

In both cases, debris from the rocket's "main stage" was thrown back to Earth, Ivory Coast and the Indian Ocean. These followed a prototype that crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2018.

None of these incidents resulted in injuries, but drew criticism from a number of space agencies.

This latest launch carried the second of three modules to China's space station. The 17.9 m long Wentian Laboratory Module will be the first of two laboratories to join the station. China began construction of the space station in April 2021 with the launch of the Tianhe module, the main living quarters.

China hopes to have Tiangong completed by the end of 2022.