China Space Station Crash: What Are The Odds A Piece Will Hit You?
Original Article | Author: Tracy Staedter
The crash is imminent: The Chinese experimental space station Tiangong-1 will fall uncontrolled to Earth on Sunday (April 1), give or take a day and a half.
With a weight of 9.4 tons (8.5 metric tons) at launch, which occurred in September 2011, the craft will be one of the heftiest chunks of space debris to re-enter our planet’s atmosphere, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). Does that mean you’re in danger of being struck?
In two words? Not really.
"The odds of being hit are very small," Marco Langbroek, a consultant with the Space Security Center of the Royal Dutch Air Force and Leiden Observatory, told Space.com.
Langbroek, who tracks spy satellites and writes the blog SatTrackCam, has been posting re-entry predictions for Tiangong-1 since March 13, 2017. "We should not overdramatize the dangers," he said.
An artist's illustration of China's Tiangong-1 space lab in Earth orbit. The 9.4-ton spacecraft is scheduled to re-enter the atmosphere on April 1, 2018, plus or minus 36 hours. (Credit: China Manned Space Engineering Office)
The risk is low for several reasons. First, although Tiangong-1 is about the size of a school bus, most of it will break apart and disintegrate as the friction of Earth’s atmosphere burns up the space lab. The surviving bits will likely scatter along a path projected to be about 1,240 miles long by 43 miles wide (2,000 by 70 kilometers), according to researchers with the Aerospace Corporation, a California-based company.
On a planet with a total surface area of about 197 million square miles (510 million square km), that’s a pretty small strip.
