Space station plunges to watery grave
CHINA: The defunct Tiangong 1 space station mostly burned up on re-entry yesterday afternoon into the atmosphere over the central South Pacific north-west of Tahiti, Chinese space authorities said.
Scientists monitoring the craft’s disintegrating orbit had forecast the craft would mostly burn up and would pose only the slightest of risks to people. Analysis from the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre showed it had mostly burned up.
Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at Australian National University, said Tiangong 1’s re-entry was ‘‘mostly successful’’ and it would have been better if the space station had not been spinning toward Earth.
‘‘It could have been better obviously, if it wasn’t tumbling, but it landed in the Southern Pacific Ocean and that’s kind of where you hope it would land.
‘‘It’s been tumbling and spinning for a while, which means that when it really starts to come down it’s less predictable about what happens to it,’’ Tucker said. He likened it to an airplane landing, saying it’s more difficult to predict where a plane ‘‘shaking around and moving’’ will land than one that is smoothly descending.
Launched in 2011, Tiangong 1 was China’s first space station, serving as an experimental platform for bigger projects, such as the Tiangong 2 launched in September 2016 and a future permanent Chinese space station.
Two crews lived on the station while testing docking procedures and other operations. Its last crew departed in 2013 and contact with it was cut in 2016.
Since then, it has orbited gradually closer and closer to Earth on its own while being monitored.
Earlier forecasts had said only about 10 per cent of the bus-sized, 8.5-tonne spacecraft would likely survive re-entry, mainly its heavier components.