The Week UK: Where and when will Chinese satellite Tiangong-1 crash - and could it hit me?

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Where and when will Chinese satellite Tiangong-1 crash - and could it hit me?
Mar 6, 2018
Experts are unsure exactly where China's first satellite will hit when it crashes back to Earth in a few weeks

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European Space Agency

China’s first space station is expected to come crashing down to Earth within weeks, but experts remain unable to predict exactly where the 8.5-tonne module will hit.
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The US-funded Aerospace Corporation estimates Tiangong-1 will re-enter the atmosphere during the first week of April, give or take a week, while the European Space Agency (ESA) says its best guess is the module will come down between 24 March and 19 April.

“Re-entry will take place anywhere between 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south (e.g. Spain, France, Portugal, Greece,) latitude,” officials with the Space Debris Office at ESA’s European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, wrote in an update last week. “Areas outside of these latitudes can be excluded. At no time will a precise time/location prediction from ESA be possible.”

    The rise and fall of #Tiangong1 https://t.co/sB6IgECyv5 pic.twitter.com/KxfRAkqDzB

    — Eilif (@Eilifursinreed) March 6, 2018

The statement from Aerospace, a research organisation that advises the US government and private enterprise on space flight, said there was “a chance that a small amount of debris” from the module will survive re-entry and hit the Earth.

“If this should happen, any surviving debris would fall within a region that is a few hundred kilometres in size,” they said.

The organisation did offer some good news though, saying “the chance of debris hitting anyone living in these nations was tiny,” reports The Guardian.

“When considering the worst-case location... the probability that a specific person (ie, you) will be struck by Tiangong-1 debris is about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot.

“In the history of spaceflight no known person has ever been harmed by re-entering space debris. Only one person has ever been recorded as being hit by a piece of space debris and, fortunately, she was not injured.”

But Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from Harvard University and space industry enthusiast, did sound a note of caution. He said fragments from a similar-sized rocket re-entered the atmosphere and landed in Peru in January.

“Every couple of years something like this happens, but Tiangong-1 is big and dense so we need to keep an eye on it,” he told The Guardian.

China's Tiangong-1 space lab “was billed as a potent symbol of the country's rise when it launched in 2011,” says CNN.

Along with its successor - the Tiangong-2, which launched in 2016 - it was a prototype for China's ultimate space goal: a permanent, 20-ton space station that is expected to launch around 2022.

Although the uncontrolled descent of Tiangong-1 is something of a PR embarrassment, it has not deterred the Chinese government.

"While the Chinese would have, of course, preferred this event not to happen, this does not present a threat to their long-term human spaceflight plans," Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security affairs at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island told CNN.
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