Science

Chinese space station to crash down to Earth this weekend

March 31, 2018 12:19·
Agencies around the world who have monitored an out-of-control Chinese space station's fall to Earth believe it has a higher chance of hitting parts of the US Europe Australia and New Zealand. Cities at higher risk include Barcelona Beijing Chicago I

Agencies around the world who have monitored an out-of-control Chinese space station's fall to Earth believe it has a higher chance of hitting parts of the US Europe Australia and New Zealand. Cities at higher risk include Barcelona Beijing Chicago I

China's first space station is expected to come crashing down to Earth within weeks, but scientists have not been able to predict where the 8.5-tonne module will hit, a media report said on Tuesday.

Tiangong-1 launched without any passengers on September 29, 2011, weighing 18,740 pounds. In 2016, China confirmed that it had lost the ability to control the behaviour of the satellite and therefore, can not confirm where will it crash.

It is unclear how much of the spacecraft would break up in the fiery fall but a Harvard astronomer, Jonathan McDowell, has estimated the debris could weigh as much as 100kg.

Time is ticking down until China's first space station plummets back down to Earth from space.

Calmer space weather around earth and its atmosphere is now expected in the coming days, which means that the density of the upper atmosphere, through which Tiangong-1 is moving, did not increase as predicted.

The station is losing altitude at approximately 2.5 miles a day and orbits between 43 degrees North latitude and 43 degrees South, so every continent except Antarctica is in the potential fall zone.

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They predict it will most likely hit over the weekend. It can also stretch up to 2nd April as the prediction is "highly variable".

The lab will likely enter the atmosphere between March 31 and April 4, according to Beijing Aerospace Control Centre and other agency estimates. Only one person, a woman in Tulsa., Okla., was hit by a small piece of debris in 1996, and she was not injured, Aerospace engineers said.

One of the most recent re-entries of space junk, comparable to Tiangong-1 in size, occurred in 2015, when Russia's Progress cargo ship failed to reach a stable orbit.

We don't know exactly where the station will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, but the best guess is between 43 North and 45 South latitudes, Aerospace.org reported. Officials thought they'd have more control of its descent, but the station stopped functioning in 2016, according to the European Space Agency.

But the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) said there is "no need for people to worry" on its WeChat social media account.

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