AFP, Paris :
An uncontrolled Chinese space station weighing at least seven tonnes (around 7,000 kg) is set to break up as it hurtles to Earth on or around April 1, the European Space Agency has forecast.
“It will mostly burn up due to the extreme heat generated by its high-speed passage through the atmosphere,” it said in a statement.
Some debris from the Tiangong-1 — or “Heavenly Palace”-spacelab will likely fall into the ocean or somewhere on land, but the chances of human injury are vanishingly small, said Stijn Lemmens, an ESA space debris expert based in Darmstadt, Germany.
“Over the past 60 years of space flight, we are nearing the mark of 6,000 uncontrolled reentries of large objects, mostly satellites and upper (rocket) stages,” he told AFP.
More than 90 percent of those bits of high-tech space junk weighed 100 kilos (220 pounds) or more.
“Only one event actually produced a fragment which hit a person, and it did not result in injury.”
Lemmens calculated the odds of being struck by space debris at one in 1.2 trillion — 10 million times less likely than getting hit by lightning.
The China Manned Space programme, which put Tiangong-1 into orbit in September 2011, has been mostly mum on the fate of China’s first space station, designed to test technologies related to docking in orbit.
An uncontrolled Chinese space station weighing at least seven tonnes (around 7,000 kg) is set to break up as it hurtles to Earth on or around April 1, the European Space Agency has forecast.
“It will mostly burn up due to the extreme heat generated by its high-speed passage through the atmosphere,” it said in a statement.
Some debris from the Tiangong-1 — or “Heavenly Palace”-spacelab will likely fall into the ocean or somewhere on land, but the chances of human injury are vanishingly small, said Stijn Lemmens, an ESA space debris expert based in Darmstadt, Germany.
“Over the past 60 years of space flight, we are nearing the mark of 6,000 uncontrolled reentries of large objects, mostly satellites and upper (rocket) stages,” he told AFP.
More than 90 percent of those bits of high-tech space junk weighed 100 kilos (220 pounds) or more.
“Only one event actually produced a fragment which hit a person, and it did not result in injury.”
Lemmens calculated the odds of being struck by space debris at one in 1.2 trillion — 10 million times less likely than getting hit by lightning.
The China Manned Space programme, which put Tiangong-1 into orbit in September 2011, has been mostly mum on the fate of China’s first space station, designed to test technologies related to docking in orbit.
