State in space station’s re-entry path
Most will burn up during its descent this weekend
Watch out above, Wisconsin. China’s first space station may be heading our way.
Tiangong-1, which launched on Sept. 30, 2011, is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere sometime between Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon, according to the European Space Agency.
Though the majority of the space station should burn up during its descent, pieces of it will crash on the planet.
Tiangong-1 — or Heavenly Palace 1 — is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere somewhere between 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south in latitude, with the highest probability in the northern part of that range.
The 43-degree north latitudinal line cuts across southern Wisconsin from Milwaukee on the east to Prairie du Chien on the west. That puts state residents from that line south to the Illinois border at risk. The space station weighs 19,000 pounds.
Don’t be too concerned though. Pieces of Tiangong-1 could still hit anywhere within a wide swath of the planet, including the cities of New York, Miami, Rio de Janeiro, Hong Kong, Cape Town, South Africa, the entire continent of Australia and a whole lot of ocean.
If that doesn’t alleviate your fears, the Aerospace Corp. says that the chance of space debris hitting someone on Earth is less than one in 1 trillion. That compares with a one in 1.4 million chance of being struck by lightning, it said.
The last space station to hit the planet was Russia’s MIR, which fell back to Earth on March 23, 2001. The 143-ton space station re-entered Earth’s orbit near Fiji, with most of it burning up in the atmosphere and the rest of the pieces falling into the South Pacific.
On July 11, 1979, Skylab, the first U.S. space station, re-entered Earth’s atmosphere amid great fanfare, breaking up and scattering debris across parts of western Australia and the Indian Ocean. Nobody was hit.