Space lab mostly burned up over South Pacific: China
Beijing: A defunct Chinese space laboratory disintegrated under intense heat as it hurtled through Earth’s atmosphere yesterday and plunged into a watery grave in the South Pacific, Chinese officials said.
The Tiangong-1 mostly burned up above the vast ocean’s central region at 8.15am Beijing time, said the China Manned Space Engineering Office. There was no immediate confirmation of the final resting place of any remaining debris.
“Most of the parts burned up and disappeared,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang, adding that China kept the UN space agency informed about the situation. “According to my knowledge, we have not found any harm to the Earth’s surface,” he said. Tiangong-1, or “Heavenly Palace”, was placed into orbit in September 2011, acting as a testing ground for China’s efforts to put a permanent space station into orbit around 2022. It ceased functioning in 2016.
Space officials had said that the 10.4m-long craft’s atmospheric disintegration would offer a splendid show akin to a meteor shower. But the remote location likely deprived stargazers of the spectacle.
Dr Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, said the module zoomed over Pyongyang in North Korea and the Japanese city of Kyoto during daylight hours, reducing the odds of glimpsing it before it hit the Pacific.