Tiangong-1 Chinese satellite: When will it crash? Will it hurt anyone? Where might it land?

Eleanor Rose30 March 2018

China's allegedly out-of-control Tiangong 1 space station is due to crash through the Earth's atmosphere sometime this weekend.

It reportedly poses only a slight risk to people and buildings on the ground, since most of the bus-sized, 8.5-ton vehicle is expected to burn up on re-entry.

However, space agencies don't know exactly when or where it will happen.

Here's everything you need to know about the dramatic crash landing of China's own version of the International Space Station this weekend.

When will it happen?

The European Space Agency predicts the station will re-enter the atmosphere between Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon - an estimate it calls "highly variable," because the ever-changing shape of the upper atmosphere affects the speed of objects falling into it.

The Chinese space agency's latest estimate puts the crash between Saturday and Wednesday.

Western space experts say they believe China has lost control of the station.

China's chief space laboratory designer Zhu Zongpeng has denied Tiangong was out of control, but hasn't provided specifics on what, if anything, China is doing to guide the craft's re-entry.

Will it put lives in danger?

Based on Tiangong 1's orbit, it will come to Earth somewhere between latitudes of 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south, or roughly somewhere over most of the United States, China, Africa, southern Europe, Australia and South America.

Out of range are Russia, Canada and northern Europe.

SatView tracking the satellite live as it makes its final orbits around earth
SatView

Based on its size, only about 10 percent of the spacecraft will survive being burned up on re-entry.

The chances of anyone person on Earth being hit by debris is considered less than one in a trillion.

How common are crashes like this?

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 US Delta II rocket while exercising in an Oklahoma park in 1997.

Blast off: The rocket carrying the Tiangong-1 space station taking off in 2011
FP/Getty Images

Most famously, America's 77-ton Skylab crashed through the atmosphere in 1979, spreading pieces of wreckage near the southwestern Australia city of Perth.

The breakup on re-entry of the Columbia space shuttle in 2003 killed all seven astronauts and sent more than 80,000 pieces of debris raining down on a large swath of the Southern United States. No one on the ground was injured.

China's own space program raised major concerns after it used a missile to destroy an out-of-service Chinese satellite in 2007, creating a large and potentially dangerous cloud of debris.

What is Tiangong 1?

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.

The station, whose name translates as "Heavenly Palace," played host to two crewed missions that included China's first female astronauts and served as a test platform for perfecting docking procedures and other operations.

Its last crew departed in 2013 and contact with it was cut in 2016. Since then it has been orbiting gradually closer and closer to Earth on its own while being monitored.

The station had two modules, one for its solar panels and engines, and one for a pair of astronauts to live in and conduct experiments.

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