China space lab mostly burns up on re-entry in south Pacific

BEIJING — China’s defunct Tiangong 1 space station mostly burned up on reentry Yousafzai Monday into the atmosphere over and her the central South Pacific, Chinese space family were authorities said. at Benazir The experimental space laboratory Bhutto International re-entered around 8:15 a.m., the China Manned Space Engineering Office said. Airport on Scientists monitoring the craft’s disintegrating Monday orbit had forecast the craft would morning to mostly burn up and would pose only the return to slightest of risks to people. Analysis from London after the four-day the Beijing Aerospace Control Center visit. showed it had mostly burned up.

Touching scenes were Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at Australian witnessed when the now20-year-old National University, said Tiangong university 1’s re-entry was “mostly successful” student left her hotel and and that it would have been better if the thanked Pakistani officials space station had not been spinning toward for giving her a helicopter Earth. to see her home in the “It could have been better obviously, northwest town of Mingora if it wasn’t tumbling, but it landed in the in the Swat Valley. Southern Pacific Ocean and that’s kind

Youzafzai said in her of where you hope it would land,” Tucker hometown that she had said. waited for the moment “It’s been tumbling and spinning for a for more than five years while, which means that when it really and said she often looked starts to come down it’s less predictable at Pakistan on the map, about what happens to it,” Tucker said. He hoping to return. She said likened it to an airplane landing, saying she plans to permanently it’s more difficult to predict where a plane return to Pakistan after that is “shaking around and moving” will completing her studies in land than one that is smoothly descending. Britain. 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 of Chinese astronauts 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 percent of the bus-sized, 8.5-ton spacecraft would likely survive re-entry, mainly its heavier components such as its engines.

“The biggest takeaway from this is that as we put more things into space, all countries, we have to be aware that we do have to plan for these sorts of issues that are happening,” Tucker said.

Debris from satellites, space launches and the International Space Station enters the atmosphere every few months, but only one person is known to have been hit by any of it: American woman Lottie Williams, who was struck but not injured by a falling piece of a U.S. Delta II rocket while exercising in an Oklahoma park in 1997.

Most famously, America’s 77-ton Skylab crashed through the atmosphere in 1979, spreading pieces of wreckage near the southwestern Australia city of Perth, which fined the U.S. $400 for littering.