Space station to fall out of sky: You should be fine

Sometime around the start of spring, a 9.4-ton Chinese space station is expected to come hurtling back to Earth.

The space station, Tiangong 1, is predicted to make that return trip in mid-March, give or take a few weeks, according to an analysis by the Aerospace Corp., a federally funded research and development center in El Segungo, Los Angeles County. But don’t worry: Odds are no one will be hurt.

“It most probably will not harm anyone,” said Andrew Abraham, a member of the team behind the analysis. “The odds of being struck by a piece of this space station as it’s reentering are exceptionally tiny.”

While the researchers are confident that humanity will probably be spared, their ability to pinpoint specific details about the re-entry is limited.

Tiangong 1, which has been unmanned for more than four years, could fall anywhere on about two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, although it is most likely to land in one of two bands that encircle the globe parallel to the equator, the researchers said.

One of those regions, in the Southern Hemisphere, includes Tasmania and parts of New Zealand, Chile and Argentina. The other, in the Northern Hemisphere, covers more land, cutting across swaths of the United States, Europe and Asia.

But even in those areas, the likelihood that anyone will be hit by part of the station is incredibly low.

“The probability that a specific person (i.e., you) will be struck by Tiangong 1 debris is about 1 million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot,” Aerospace noted in the analysis.

Re-entry events like the one predicted for Tiangong 1 are common: Thousands of objects have re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the past halfcentury, according to Aerospace. That includes dozens of large objects each year.

As they come flying back to Earth, the objects compress the air beneath them, generating intense heat, up to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, according to the researchers. That heat and pressure can cause the objects to break apart, melt and vaporize, leaving little left to reach the Earth’s surface.

Even when objects survive the fall, they rarely cause substantial harm. Only one person is known to have been hit by such debris: Lottie Williams of Oklahoma was struck without injury by a small chunk of a rocket booster in 1997.