An 8.5-ton Chinese space station will come barrelling back down to Earth on Sunday night.
An 8.5-ton Chinese space station will come barreling back down to Earth on Sunday night, leaving much of the world on guard about where it might land.
The dormant Tiangong 1 is now projected to spin back into the atmosphere within 2 1/2 hours before or after 8 p.m. eastern daylight time Sunday.
Tiangong loomed just 90 miles above Earth by 3:30 p.m. Sunday, according to live-tracker Heavens Above.
Scorching fragments from the 7-year-old space lab are projected to strike a massive swath of the world — except for Canada, Russia and the northern reaches of Europe.
Chinese space lab to crash from sky this weekend
“The high speeds of returning satellites mean they can travel thousands of kilometres during that time window, and that makes it very hard to predict a precise location of reentry,” Holger Krag, head of debris for the European Space Agency, said in a blog post for the organization .
People on the ground only face minimal risks, scientists warned, because just 10% of the bus-size station is expected to survive the burning re-entry process.
A human has one in a trillion shot of getting hit from a piece of Tiangong, which translates to “Heavenly Place.”
The station’s re-entry had stoked fear for months, however, as scientists remained unsure when the craft might land back on Earth.
China’s space station will soon plummet to Earth
China has fought back accusations it isn’t guiding the lab’s re-entry.
Zhu Zongpeng, the nation’s chief space laboratory designer, insisted the process is in control — but hasn’t given any details on what China is doing.
China inexplicably lost contact with Tiangong 1 in 2016, three years after crews abandoned the lab.
It’s since spun closer and closer to Earth, floating just 122 miles above the blue planet on Thursday, the China Daily previously reported.
Tiangong was the first lab China launched, in 2011, as an experimental for future space exploration.
It launched Tiangong 2 in September 2012 as a second phase of its space labs, with hopes to eventually develop something more permanent.
With News Wire Services
