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posted by janrinok on Saturday March 10 2018, @02:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-goes-up dept.

The out-of-control Chinese space station is now predicted to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere sometime around the beginning of April. Most of it will burn up on the way down, but it's possible some pieces of the 9-ton spacecraft could make it to the surface.

Tiangong means "Heavenly Palace" in English and Tiangong-1 was China's first space station, launched in 2011. The original plan for the craft's demise was a controlled re-entry that would allow it to burn up over an unpopulated section of the South Pacific, with any surviving fragments falling in the sea. 

But as early as March 2016, reports began to suggest that Tiangong-1 was malfunctioning and ground crews had lost control of the craft. In other words, there appears to be little chance of performing the maneuvers to steer it to a graceful breakup over the ocean. Instead, it's all up to chance.

According to a new projection from the European Space Agency on Tuesday, the space station is expected to make a likely uncontrolled re-entry roughly between March 29 and April 9. The ESA stresses that it won't be possible to make a precise prediction about exactly when or where Tiangong-1 will burn up and how much of it will get all the way through the atmosphere to the surface. 

That said, the Chinese space station is fairly easy to track and ESA says in an online FAQ that we should know about a day in advance of the craft's end which regions of the planet might be able to see it actually burning up in the sky. Predicting where any impact might occur is significantly more difficult, however. 

"Even 7 hours before the actual re-entry, the uncertainty on the break-up location is a full orbital revolution -- meaning plus or minus thousands of kilometers," writes ESA's Daniel Scuka.

Tiangong-1's orbit spans from 43 degrees north to 43 degrees south, or from the central United States down to the southern tip of Australia, according to Jay Melosh, a professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences at Purdue University. He explains that it could come down anywhere between the two points but is more likely to land at either extreme because the station spends more time there.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:02PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 10 2018, @03:02PM (#650521)

    You know, before we start contaminating Mars with earth germs, I'd much rather make reasonably sure that there are no truly indigenous Mars germs first. Otherwise we might think that there is actually life on Mars, but all we've really done is contaminate it with Earth life.

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Saturday March 10 2018, @08:38PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Saturday March 10 2018, @08:38PM (#650630)

    Is that necessarily a bad things if our germs take over ?
    It's a bit extreme, as natural selection goes, but it also means:
    1) our germs can live on Mars
    2) germs that we have spent millennia getting good at fighting are the one we have to face on Mars.

    "Hey, there are other forms of life on Mars, and they kick ass" is scientifically interesting, but that could also doom us to stay on our current trash heap.