Great Fall of China
Tiangong-1 space station’s dramatic return to Earth
CHINA’S space station plunged to Earth at speeds of more than 16,000mph, disintegrating as it re-entered the atmosphere.
Tiangong-1 burned up over the South Pacific in the early hours yesterday, off the coast of Tahiti.
It came after China’s space agency wrongly predicted the 8.5-tonne, bus-sized installation would re-enter off Brazil.
Scientists had speculated for months amid fears large chunks of it could come down near populated areas.
Tiangong-1, launched in 2011 to carry out experiments, stopped working in 2016. China Manned Space Engi- neering Office had no contact with the station, known as Heavenly Palace, so could not fire thrusters to control its descent. It said the station re-entered the atmosphere at around 1.15am yesterday, adding: “The re-entry falling area is located in the central region of the South Pacific. “Most of the devices were ablated during the re-entry process.” Jonathan McDowell, astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge Massachusetts, tweeted: “NW of Tahiti: it managed to miss the ‘spacecraft graveyard’ further south.” He had said variations in the atmosphere made it hard to tell when and where it would re-enter as it orbited at around 16,000mph. He told the BBC: “As this thing is flying at 26,000km an hour around the Earth, it’s skimming the atmosphere.
“There is a headwind that’s blowing it around and you don’t know one day to the next how much wind there is going to be.”
US specialists at the Joint Force Space Component Command said they used orbit analysis technology to confirm Tiangong-1’s re-entry.
The European Space Agency had stressed chances of being hit by its debris were “10 million times smaller than the yearly chance of being hit by lightning”. More than 7,500 tonnes of debris, from spacecraft to screws, already circle the Earth.