Tiangong-1 Crash Lands in the Pacific Ocean

China’s defunct Tiangong 1 space station mostly burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere over the central South Pacific on Monday, Chinese and U.S. space authorities said on Monday.

Asked about the space station, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told a regular briefing he had no other information and reiterated that China had been reporting the situation to the United Nations space agency in an open and transparent way.

We have been following the journey of the Tiangong-1 Space Station for quite some time now and the day that it re-entered the atmosphere is finally here.

China’s human spaceflight agency CMSA also announced, following monitoring and analysis by the Beijing Aerospace Control Centre (BACC), a similar reentry time, with any remaining Tiangong-1 debris falling over the central region of the South Pacific.

The Tiangong-1, measuring 10 metres long and weighing around 8.5 tonnes, was launched on September 29, 2011. Launched in 2011, the space station was really just a first step in the country’s grand plan to establish a presence in space.

China lost control of the space station around two years ago in June 2016 making it float arbitrary in Earth’s orbit.

At last, the out-of-control Chinese space station Tinagong-1 has made its fall down on Earth.

The death of Tiangong-1 has actually been long prepared for.

“Most parts were burned up in the re-entry process”, it added.

Tiangong-1 returned to Earth uncontrolled. Those satellites are created to spot missile launches and other unexpected launch events – “but they can also see forest fires, and they can see melting spaceships” like Tiangong-1, McDowell said. Space outpost like Russia’s Mir station had made a controlled re-entry in 2001. The run-down spacecraft has actually been gradually befalling of its initial orbit for a number of years.

The spacecraft – about the size of a city bus – nearly entirely burned up on its entrance to the Earth’s atmosphere, breaking into small pieces as it fell over the South Pacific Ocean, NPR reports. The fragments will keep burning and majority will be dissipated in the air.

China, meanwhile, has a new Heavenly Palace up there, Tiangong-2, which was launched in 2016.

Only one person – of Tulsa, Oklahoma – is known to have been hit by space debris. He mentions in his tweet, that the falling station has missed the “spacecraft graveyard”, the place where most satellites that stopped working have fallen. “The ESA had previously stated that the chances of any people being hit by the Tiangong-1 debris are 10 million times smaller than a person being hit by lightning”.