China sent another lab, Tiangong-2, into orbit in September 2016 as a stepping stone to its goal of having a crewed space station by 2022.
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The space craft’s descent is now being tracked by Aerospace engineering and the ESA – and say it is now dropping out of orbit by about 2.5 miles a day.
Space.com reports that the revised targets will change the likely debris fall area for Tiangong-1.
The craft re-entered the atmosphere around 8:15 a.m. Beijing time (0015GMT) and the “vast majority” of it had burnt up upon re-entry, the authority said in a brief statement on its website.
“Most of the parts burnt up and disappeared”, foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters, adding that China kept the United Nations space agency informed about the situation.
Ostensibly a pilot mission for the Tiangong-2 space laboratory, the first of China’s orbiters hosted two manned missions in 2012 and 2013. The spacecraft was launched into space in September 2011, and has been the site of a two-man mission and a three-man mission.
“Relax. The chances of a piece of this thing hitting somebody on Earth are pretty slim, very slim, but not zero”.
Zhu Congpeng, from China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporate said: “We have been continuously monitoring Tiangong-1 and expect to allow it to fall within the first half of this year”.
While debris regularly comes back down, most of it “burns up or ends up in the middle of the ocean and away from people”, says Mr Aboutanios.
If Tiangong-1 does reenter near you, chances are you will be able to see debris burning up in the sky, much like a small series of white meteors.
Tiangong-1 was created to be a manned lab, and it’s composed of two modules: a habitable module and a resources module.
China was excluded from the 420-ton International Space Station mainly due to US legislation barring such cooperation and concerns over the Chinese space program’s strong military connections. The original programme suggested it would go through a planned de-orbiting prior to controlled Earth re-entry.
But it stopped working in March 2016 – three years after it was last occupied – and there is no way of knowing where it will land. Nevertheless, Aerospace Corp. says a clearer path of re-entry will be determined hours before it makes contact with the ground.
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NBC News explains only one person named Lottie Williams of Tulsa, Oklahoma, is known to be hit by space debris falling to Earth.
