What do we know about where it came down?<\/strong><\/p>\nThe 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>\nIdeally, 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":[],"categories":[107],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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