China’s defunct Tiangong-1 space lab mostly broke up on re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere above the South Pacific, Chinese and US reports say.<\/p>\n
It re-entered the atmosphere around 00:15 GMT on Monday, China’s Manned Space Engineering Office said.<\/p>\n
Tiangong-1 was launched in 2011 to carry out docking and orbit experiments.<\/p>\n
It was part of China’s efforts to build a manned space station by 2022, but stopped working in March 2016.<\/p>\n
What do we know about where it came down?<\/strong><\/p>\n The rather vague “above the South Pacific” is the line from space officials.<\/p>\n US specialists at the Joint Force Space Component Command said they had used orbit analysis technology to confirm Tiangong-1’s re-entry.<\/p>\n Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tweeted that it appeared to have come down north-west of Tahiti.<\/p>\n Experts had struggled to predict exactly where the lab would make its re-entry – and China’s space agency wrongly suggested it would be off Sao Paulo, Brazil, shortly before the moment came.<\/p>\n The European Space Agency said in advance that Tiangong-1 would probably break up over water, which covers much of the Earth’s surface.<\/p>\n It stressed that the chances of anyone being hit by debris from the module were “10 million times smaller than the yearly chance of being hit by lightning”.<\/p>\n It’s not clear how much of the debris reached the Earth’s surface intact.<\/p>\n Why did the space lab fall like this?<\/strong><\/p>\n Ideally, the 10m (32ft)-long Tiangong module would have been taken out of orbit in a planned manner.<\/p>\n Traditionally, thrusters are fired on large vehicles to drive them towards a remote zone over the Southern Ocean. This option appears not to have been available after the loss of command links.<\/p>\n Thirteen space agencies,\u00a0under the leadership of the European Space Agency, used radar and optical observations to follow Tiangong’s path around the globe.<\/p>\n –<\/p>\n Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" China’s defunct Tiangong-1 space lab mostly broke up on re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere above the South Pacific, Chinese and US reports say. It re-entered the atmosphere around 00:15 GMT on Monday, China’s Manned Space Engineering Office said. Tiangong-1 was launched in 2011 to carry out docking and orbit experiments. It was part of China’s efforts […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":414963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-414962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=414962"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414962\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/414963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=414962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=414962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=414962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}