It’s expected to fall to Earth sometime between early morning on March 30 and early morning on April 2, with April 1 being the potential sweet spot for skywatchers.
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The defunct Chinese space lab Tiangong-1 that had been hurtling towards Earth re-entered the planet’s atmosphere on Monday at around 08:15 am Beijing time, according to China’s Manned Space Agency.
But more than 70 percent of Earth’s surface is covered by water, so it’s unusual for uncontrolled reentries to occur over land and even more unusual for them to be risky.
UPDATE: #JFSCC confirmed #Tiangong1 reentered the atmosphere over the southern Pacific Ocean at ~5:16 p.m. (PST) April 1.
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.
Space officials and stargazers were hopeful that the “atmospheric disintegration” of the space station would offer spectacular sights in the sky – similar to a meteor shower.
The Tiangong-1 had previously docked with Shenzhou-8, Shenzhou-9 and Shenzhou-10 spacecrafts. With a designated life span of two years, the spacecraft was in service for four and a half years before its retirement was announced by authorities in March 2016.
In terms of space stations, China’s Tiangong-1 was considered relatively small weighing in at 8.5 tons. It was re-fuelled past year and is expected to be a permanent space station with a large core module and two smaller ancillary modules by early next decade. The initial reentry estimate was 2017, but now we are finally close to the end of Tiangong-1. However, the experts assured that there was no danger for humans.
The European Space Agency forecast the station, whose name translates as “Heavenly Palace”, was to re-enter between Sunday night and early today.
The space station is now doomed and making a re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
‘The good thing is that it doesn’t cause any damage when it comes down and that’s what we like’.
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Let’s hope that’s the case with the next piece of space debris that rains down; there are over 21,000 objects larger than 4 inches big being tracked by the Department of Defense’s U.S. Space Surveillance Network, and they’re cruising at almost 18,000 miles per hour. Indeed, the space station’s case highlights the fact that scientists still don’t have the necessary technology or research to wrangle the significant number of variables that factor into tracking and modeling such situations. American woman Lottie Williams was hit but not injured when a piece of the U.S. Delta II rocket hit her while she exercised in an Oklahoma park in 1997.
