space station crashing

Keep looking up, although, if this thing comes down where you are, it's not likely you will be able to outrun it. Of course, the odds of you getting hit by a piece of it are very, very small. Very small.

Chinese Space Station Will Crash to Earth

from Space.com

China's first prototype space station, Tiangong-1, will come crashing back to Earth between March 30 and April 2 in an uncontrolled re-entry, give or take a few days, according to the latest forecast by the European Space Agency.  For a primer on the space lab and its mission, as well as links to Tiangong-1 stories, galleries and infographics, 

click here.

Tiangong-1, whose name translates as "Heavenly Palace-1," launched without anyone aboard on Sept. 29, 2011. It settled into an orbit about 217 miles (350 kilometers) above Earth — a little lower than the International Space Station, whose average altitude is 250 miles (400 km).

The 9.4-ton (8.5 metric tons) Tiangong-1 is about 34 feet long by 11 feet wide (10.4 by 3.4 meters) and features 530 cubic feet (15 cubic m) of habitable internal volume. [China's Tiangong-1 Space Lab in Pictures]

Why is Tiangong-1 falling from space?

Tiangong-1 was designed to keep ticking for just two years; China put it into "sleep mode" shortly thereafter. Originally, Chinese officials had said they planned to de-orbit Tiangong-1 in a controlled fashion, using the craft's thrusters to guide it into Earth's atmosphere. But in March 2016, China announced that Tiangong-1 had stopped sending data back to its handlers. The spacecraft's functions "have been disabled," according to a report at the time by the state-run Xinhua news service. So a controlled re-entry was no longer in the cards; the space lab would fall back to Earth on its own, pulled down by atmospheric drag.

Tiangong-1 won't be the biggest spacecraft ever to fall uncontrolled from the sky. In July 1979, for example, NASA's 85-ton Skylab space station burned up over the Indian Ocean and Western Australia. Some big chunks survived the fall, and the Australian town of Esperance famously sued NASA $400 for littering. And in February 1991, the Soviet Union's 22-ton Salyut 7 orbital outpost came tumbling down while it was connected to another 22-ton spacecraft called Cosmos 1686. Nobody was aboard Skylab or the Salyut-Cosmos 1686 complex when they hit Earth's atmosphere. (The Soviet-Russian space station Mir was even larger, at about 140 tons. But its March 2001 destruction was a controlled re-entry.)

Where will Tiangong-1 fall to Earth?

Based on Tiangong-1's orbital details, that will happen somewhere between 43 degrees north latitude and 43 degrees south — a huge swath of the globe that stretches from the South Dakota-Nebraska border all the way down to Tasmania.

A map showing the area between 42.8 degrees north and 42.8 degrees south latitudes (in green), over which Tiangong-1 could re-enter. The graph at left shows population density.

Credit: ESA CC BY-SA IGO 3.0

Will any parts of it reach Earth?

Most of Tiangong-1 will break apart and burn up in Earth's atmosphere, but some of the space lab's hardier pieces will probably survive re-entry, experts have said. However, these flaming space-junk chunks will probably splash down in the ocean, which covers about 70 percent of the planet's surface.

And don't worry about death from above: The chances that a piece of Tiangong-1 will hit you are less than 1 in 1 trillion, according to an FAQ published by The Aerospace Corporation. But if you do stumble across a piece of smoking space wreckage, don't pick it up or breathe in any fumes it may be emitting, the FAQ added: It might be made of, or carrying, toxic material.

What came after Tiangong-1?

Tiangong-1 wasn't the last of its kind. In September 2016, China launched a slightly bigger follow-on called Tiangong-2, which hosted the visiting Shenzhou-11 craft and its three crewmembers in October of that year. China also launched a robotic cargo vehicle called Tianzhou-1, which docked with and refueled Tiangong-2 in April 2017. Tianzhou-1 performed two additional docking-refueling operations before being de-orbited under command from ground controllers in September 2017. (Tiangong-2 is still aloft.)

It doesn't look like there will be a Tiangong-3. After the Tianzhou-1 successes, Chinese officials said that the nation will soon start building and assembling a permanent space station, which crews could visit as early as 2022.

Original.