Spacecraft into Pacific
AN 8.5-ton Chinese space station came barreling down to Earth on Sunday night but mostly burned up when it reentered the atmosphere, officials said.
The dormant Tiangong 1was looming 90 miles above Earth around 3:30 p.m. Eastern time, according to live-tracker Heavens Above, leaving much of the world on guard about where and how much of it might land.
But Chinese space officials said not much got past the atmosphere when Tiangong 1 fell through above the southern Pacific Ocean around 8:15 p.m.
“The high speeds of returning satellites mean they can travel thousands of kilometers during that time window, and that makes it very hard to predict a precise location of reentry,” Holger Krag of the European Space Agency said in a blog post.