THIS WE KNOW: An 8.5 ton Chinese Space Station is flying out of control and is now forecast to crash somewhere on Earth.
This we don’t know: experts won’t know exactly where until a few hours before impact.
The China Manned Space Engineering Office is tracking the failed floating laboratory while the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Space Debris Office is also tracking the crashing space station; it believes it will now make impact on Earth between March 29 to April 9.
Aerospace Corporation is also tracking the falling satellite. They’ve updated their website to reflect where the space station is most likely to crash, if it makes it all the way to the Earth’s surface. They write, “There is a chance that a small amount of Tiangong-1 debris may survive reentry and impact the ground. Should this happen, any surviving debris would fall within a region that is a few hundred kilometers in size and centered along a point on the Earth that the station passes over. ”
Launched on September 29, 2011, the Tiangong-1 was China’s first space station. It conducted six successive rendezvous and dockings with Chinese spacecraft Shenzhou-8, Shenzhou-9, and Shenzhou-10. It has completed almost 35,000 orbits in the time since it was launched into space. In June of 2016, an amateur space observer noticed the space station was out of control. Thomas Dorman, who has been documenting flyovers of the spacecraft using telescopes, binoculars, video and still cameras, a DVD recorder, a computer and other gear, told Space.com then, “”If I am right, China will wait until the last minute to let the world know it has a problem with their space station.”
