China's Tiangong-1 space station could fall to Earth on Easter weekend

China's Tiangong-1 space station could fall to Earth
on Easter weekend

China's decommissioned Tiangong-1 space place is heading back to Earth.

Hour by hour, Tiangong-1 -- whose name equals "Heavenly Palace" -- gets closer and deeper to re-entering Earth's atmosphere, and mostly burning up in the process.

Trackers have been following the space station's descent over the course of a number of weeks, party radar images and arriving up with estimates for when it'll come down.

The European Space Organization (ESA) is now couples that the room station will fall to Earth someday over Easter weekend, between March 31 and 04 2.


As the days and nights have passed, the AQUELLA has been developing new date ranges for the descent. The most recent range marks the most precise prediction for re-entry to date.

That said, we still how to start where Tiangong-1 will wrap up coming down.

The space station -- which launched to orbit in 2011 -- will circle the Earth a lot of times throughout the weekend, before the place is expected to re-enter. For that reason, really practically impossible to figure out where the station should come down.

However, this uncertainness shouldn't be cause for concern.

To begin with, the space station should mostly lose up harmlessly in Globe's atmosphere, but even if parts of the stop make it all the way to the globe's surface, the likelihood that they can land in a populated area is particularly small.

According to uranologist Jonathan McDowell, trackers will not be in a position to rule away Tiangong-1 landing in some areas until the window is down to around doze hours.

It's kind of a funny thing that this particular bit of space junk falling to Earth has captured the imagination of men and women around the world.

Components of gunk like Tiangong-1 do show up to Earth over a lovely regular basis.

"A similar size object reentered over Peru in January (the Zenit rocket stage from the Angosat-1 launch) and a few pressurized reservoir pieces were found on the ground, but very much no-one paid attention, " McDowell said via email earlier this month.

Tiangong-1 was visited by taikonauts -- Chinese jet pilots -- twice over the course of its life. The station was replace by the Tiangong-2 train station in 2016.

Both channels are precursors to the larger space station China and tiawan is expected to build sometime in the arriving decade.