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China confirmed in a press conference, that Tiangong-1, their first space station put into orbit in 2011, will re-enter and burn up in the atmosphere sometime in late 2017. There seems to be some uncertainty in when it will re-enter the atmosphere, which leads one to believe that the station is not under orbital control and that it will come back to Earth in the same manner that Skylab did in 1979.
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First Chinese Space Station Coming Back to Earth
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The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
How many QA engineers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
3: 1 to screw it in and 2 to say "I told you so" when it doesn't work.
(Score: 5, Informative) by deadstick on Sunday September 25 2016, @03:16PM
To amplify a bit: The trajectory of a deorbiting object can be predicted accurately if we know the shape and mass of the object, because that's enough information to calculate the drag. It works well for an object that's designed to reenter, like a missile or a manned spacecraft. But these objects are also designed to survive the process.
A space station isn't: it's designed to stay up there and it won't reenter in one piece. It will break up in a highly unpredictable manner, with each piece having a different shape and mass and coming down in a different place. Further, even the point at which the disintegration starts is unpredictable, so there's a huge uncertainty in how far along the orbital track pieces will start impacting. Once the disintegration starts, more information starts to emerge, and the center of the impact area can be predicted to some degree of precision -- but this won't happen until well into the last revolution. Basically, you can draw a stripe on the map many hundreds of km long and say most of the debris will come down in it.
Something to worry about? No: nature throws rocks at you every day, and almost always misses. Meteors big enough to get through the atmosphere hit the surface at a rate of dozens per day, worldwide. Estimate the fraction of the Earth's surface that's occupied by human flesh and you're on the way to seeing why human injuries are pretty rare (one in the 20th century, more in the massive Chelyabinsk event of 2013).
I would gladly stand outdoors at the computed impact center...it would be quite a show.