Chinese space station will crash in a matter of weeks

Earth

An 8.5-ton Chinese space station will crash over the next few weeks, but nobody knows where.

 

Tiangong 1 was abandoned in 2011, and is a prototype which China was hoping to become a permanent space station.

However, almost seven years after it was launched, the journey Is coming to an end. China announced in September 2016 that they had lost control of thet 10 meter long, and 8.5 tons heavy, space station, and that it would probably hit the ground by the
end of 2017.

The European Space Agency (ESA) announced in November that Tiangong 1 is likely to reach land between January and March 2018.

Where the Chinese space station will crash, no one dares to say, but the experts hope, and believe, that it will burn up in the atmosphere.

However, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell at Harvard University believes that parts of up to 100 kilograms will hit the ground, but he can’t predict where they’ll land.

Even small changes in the conditions in the atmosphere could cause the crash site to change from one continent to another, he believes.

‘It’s really impossible to control these things,’ McDowell told The Guardian newspaper in October.

Spacecraft rarely hit the earth, but it has happened before. The Russian space station, Soviet Salyut 7, crashed in 1991, and NASA’s Skylab space station dropped over Western Australia in 1979.

© NTB Scanpix / Norway Today