Incoming! Space nuts and nervous Nellies alike are looking to the skies Sunday as a school-bus-sized Chinese space station careens toward Earth. Don’t go…
Incoming!
Space nuts and nervous Nellies alike are looking to the skies Sunday as a school-bus-sized Chinese space station careens toward Earth.
Don’t go hunting for souvenirs if the plummeting, unmanned Chinese space station breaks up over New York City: Pocketing a piece of the fallen space junk could land you in jail, experts say.
“According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, a country’s spacecraft is their legal property until they say that it’s not their legal property,” space historian Robert Z. Pearlman told LiveScience.com .
“No matter where it lands — whether it lands in the ocean and sinks to the bottom of the sea, or whether it lands on their own land or some other country’s land — it belongs to that country of origin.”
Up to 440 pounds of mangled debris is likely to survive re-entry into the atmosphere, according to Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. Bits and pieces will be scattered over a debris field that could be 400 miles long and 30 miles wide — and the US danger zone, where the remains are most likely to drop, stretches from Northern California all the way to the five boroughs.
