"The crash is imminent"
The Chinese experimental space station Tiangong-1 is expected to fall to Earth on Easter Sunday, give or take a day and a half.
Chinese space station, Tiangong-1, is expected to reenter the atmosphere following the end of its operational life. Most of the craft should burn up but before it does Germany’s Fraunhofer FHR research institute created this composite RADAR image of it https://t.co/rjdByjpUDR pic.twitter.com/lFp6KuGuBW
— Michelle Dickinson (@medickinson) March 30, 2018
Lovely.
China's out-of-control spacelab will break into fireballs as it plunges back to Earth in the coming days, but space officials say sit back, relax and watch the "splendid" show: https://t.co/9GpWaMERQT
— Laurent Thomet 卢鸿 (@LThometAFP) March 30, 2018
Nothing to worry about then? Actually, nothing at all. We'll be graand.
Officials are saying the odds of being hit by a small piece of space junk are slim to none.
Writing in Space.Com, Tracy Staedter said "With a weight of 9.4 tons (8.5 metric tons) at launch, which occurred in September 2011, the craft will be one of the heftiest chunks of space debris to re-enter our planet’s atmosphere, according to the European Space Agency(ESA)."
She goes on to say "The risk is low for several reasons. First, although Tiangong-1 is about the size of a school bus, most of it will break apart and disintegrate as the friction of Earth’s atmosphere burns up the space lab. The surviving bits will likely scatter along a path projected to be about 1,240 miles long by 43 miles wide (2,000 by 70 kilometers), according to researchers with the Aerospace Corporation, a California-based company.
On a planet with a total surface area of about 197 million square miles (510 million square km), that’s a pretty small strip.
And that strip will probably fall on the ocean, which covers 70 percent of Earth's surface. Combine that with the fact that most people live clumped together in cities, and the chances of getting whacked on the noggin from a falling piece of space debris are less than 1 in 1 trillion, according to an Aerospace Corp."
Well, phew!
Cover image via Twitter/@lorengrush
