SPACE DEBRIS ALERT

The skylab is falling!

Holy plummeting toxic space junk! The Big Apple may be in the path of a broken Chinese space lab that is expected to crash in flames into the Earth on Easter weekend, according to a report. The 34-foot, 9.4-ton chunk of burning junk will reenter the atmosphere between March 30 and April 3, according to the European Space Agency, which is tracking its path.

Exactly where the out-of-control space lab will crash remains a mystery.

Also unknown is how much of it will be left once it bursts into flames upon reentering Earth’s atmosphere. Flaming remnants of 200 pounds or more could still strike Earth, experts said.

The space lab was dubbed “Tiangong-1,” for “Heavenly Palace,” by the Chinese when they launched it into low-Earth orbit in September 2011. It has been essentially space junk since at least 2016, when US observers noticed it appeared to be in a slow, uncontrolled roll as it orbited about 200 miles above the earth.

Scientists tracking the doomed craft at the ESA’s Space Debris Office say Tiangong-1 will hit the northern hemisphere — most likely around latitudes of 43 degrees north and south, the Daily Mail reported.

In addition to New York City, the narrow strip includes the heavily populated cities of Barcelona, Beijing, Chicago, Istanbul, Rome and Toronto.

The threat of the Big Apple possibly being struck by a blazing projectile from space recalled a similar threat, issued in March 1998, that a “Doomsday” asteroid was on a crash course with Earth. Later that month, The Post ran a page one story, titled, “KISS YOUR ASTEROID GOODBYE!” that canceled the pending catastrophe with new calculations showing the fiery rock would miss Earth by 600,000 miles.

The ESA stressed that the “Heavenly Palace” crash-date estimates remain “highly variable” and that its experts would be providing revised forecasts every couple of days.

“At no time will a precise time/ location prediction from ESA be possible,’” the debris office, based in Darmstadt, Germany, said in a statement.

Despite the alarming news, experts pointed out that the chance of being struck by Tiangong-1 debris is about a million times less likely than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot.