Pieces weighing up to 100kg could make it to the surface, says expert, when out-of-control 8.5-tonne laboratory breaks apart in the atmosphere 
 
 An 8.5-tonne Chinese space station has accelerated its out-of-control descent towards Earth and is expected to crash to the surface within a few months. 
 
 The Tiangong-1 or “Heavenly Palace” lab was launched in 2011 and described as a “potent political symbol” of China, part of an ambitious scientific push to turn China into a space superpower. 
 
 It was used for both manned and unmanned missions and visited by China’s first female astronaut, Liu Yang, in 2012. 
 
 But in 2016, after months of speculation, Chinese officials confirmed they had lost control of the space station and it would crash to Earth in 2017 or 2018. China’s space agency has since notified the UN that it expects Tiangong-1 to come down between October 2017 and April 2018. 
 
 Since then the station’s orbit has been steadily decaying. In recent weeks it has dipped into more dense reaches of Earth’s atmosphere and started falling faster. 
 
 “Now that [its] perigee is below 300km and it is in denser atmosphere, the rate of decay is getting higher,” said Jonathan McDowell, a renowned astrophysicist from Harvard University and a space industry enthusiast. 
 
 “I expect it will come down a few months from now – late 2017 or early 2018.” 
 
 Although much of the craft is expected to burn up in the atmosphere, McDowell says some parts might still weigh up to 100kg when they crash into the Earth’s surface. 
 
 The chance that anyone will be harmed by the debris is considered remote but China told the United Nations “Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space” in May that it would carefully monitor the craft’s descent and inform the United Nations when it begins its final plunge. 
 
 Predicting where it is going to come down would be impossible even in the days ahead of its landing, McDowell said. 
 
 “You really can’t steer these things,” he said in 2016. “Even a couple of days before it re-enters we probably won’t know better than six or seven hours, plus or minus, when it’s going to come down. Not knowing when it’s going to come down translates as not knowing where it’s going to come down.” 
 
 McDowell said a slight change in atmospheric conditions could nudge the landing site “from one continent to the next”. 
 
 There have been many uncontrolled re-entries of larger spacecraft and none have ever been reported to have caused injuries to people. 
 
 In 1991 the Soviet Union’s 20-tonne Salyut 7 space station crashed to Earth while still docked to another 20-tonne spacecraft called Cosmos 1686. They broke up over Argentina, scattering debris over the town of Capitán Bermúdez. 
 
 Nasa’s enormous 77-tonne Skylab space station came hurtling to Earth in an almost completely uncontrolled descent in 1979, with some large pieces landing outside Perth in Western Australia. ||||| Artist's illustration of China's 8-ton Tiangong-1 space lab, which is expected to fall to Earth late next year, unless it's boosted to a higher altitude. 
 
 China's first-ever space lab will die a fiery death in Earth's atmosphere toward the end of next year, Chinese officials said. 
 
 The 9.4-ton (8.5 metric tons) Tiangong-1 spacecraft is currently intact and orbiting Earth at an altitude of 230 miles (370 kilometers), according to Wu Ping, deputy director of China's Manned Space Engineering office. That's a bit lower than the International Space Station, which usually stays about 250 miles (400 km) above the planet's surface. 
 
 Tiangong-1 will likely fall back to Earth in the second half of 2017, and its demise shouldn't cause problems here on the ground, Wu said. [Gallery: Tiangong 1, China's First Space Laboratory] 
 
 "Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling," she said during a news conference Wednesday (Sept. 14), according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency. 
 
 China is monitoring Tiangong-1 (whose name means "Heavenly Palace" in Mandarin) closely and will issue the appropriate warnings if the space lab threatens to hit a satellite, Wu added. She said that China will release a forecast of Tiangong-1's fall to Earth "if necessary," according to Xinhua. 
 
 The update from Wu seems to confirm speculation that China is no longer in control of the 34-foot-long (10.3 meters) Tiangong-1, which launched in September 2011 to test out docking technologies and other skills that China will need to build its planned space station in the early 2020s. 
 
 After all, if operators were still controlling the space lab, they could steer it to a guided re-entry over an empty stretch of ocean at a specified time. 
 
 Three spacecraft docked with Tiagong-1 during its operational life — Shenzhou-8 in November 2011, Shenzhou-9 in June 2012 and Shenzhou-10 in June 2013. The latter two missions were crewed, each carrying three Chinese "taikonauts" up to the space lab. 
 
 Tiangong-1 stopped sending data back to Earth in March 2016, officially ending the space lab's mission. But its successor is now aloft: Tiangong-2 launched atop a Long March 2F rocket on Sept. 15 from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China. 
 
 Two taikonauts are scheduled to arrive at Tiangong-2 in mid- to late October for a 30-day stay, Chinese officials have said. (The Shenzhou-9 and Shenzhou-10 crews spent eight and 12 days aboard Tiangong-1, respectively.) 
 
 China is not part of the multinational consortium, led by the United States and Russia, that operates the 440-ton (400 metric ton) International Space Station. China aims to have its own 60-ton (54 metric tons) space station up and running in Earth orbit by 2022 or so. 
 
 Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com. ||||| Chinese Space Lab Crashes To Earth 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Kin Cheung/AP Kin Cheung/AP 
 
 Updated at 10:15 p.m. ET 
 
 As predicted, China's Tiangong-1 space lab fell from the sky on Sunday evening. 
 
 The city bus-sized craft, which almost entirely burned up as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, broke into small pieces as it plummeted over the South Pacific Ocean. The derelict spacecraft has been slowly falling out of its original orbit for several years. 
 
 The disintegrating lab hurtled from orbit toward the South Pacific waters at about 8:16 p.m. ET, Space.com reports. 
 
 Scientists say the disintegrated debris that survived the fiery descent was likely small and relatively harmless, reports NPR's Rebecca Hersher. 
 
 "The Chinese space agency had originally planned to bring the lab back in a more controlled way," Rebecca says. "But after it stopped functioning in 2016, they decided to let it fall to earth on its own." 
 
 As NPR's Scott Neuman noted in our earlier reporting, the "space lab" was part of China's planned research as it works toward a permanently staffed space station. (China does not participate in the operation of the International Space Station.) A second space lab, Tiangong-2, was launched in 2016. 
 
 "The 34-foot-long, 18,000 pound Tiangong-1, or 'Heavenly Palace-1' was launched in 2011 as China's first attempt at an orbiting space lab," Scott wrote. "It was occupied by two separate crews of three astronauts, or taikonauts, each – a mission in June 2012 included China's first female astronaut, Liu Yang. A year later, another crew included the country's second woman in space, Wang Yaping." 
 
 The demise of Tiangong-1 has been long anticipated. 
 
 In 2016, an amateur satellite tracker observed that the satellite appeared to be on track for an uncontrolled fall of orbit. That was months before the Chinese government acknowledged that the space lab would be re-entering the earth. 
 
 At the time, China had predicted a late 2017 re-entry, but later estimates pushed that date back into early 2018. 
 
 The "re-entry prediction window" from the European Space Agency, or ESA, had tightened significantly by Sunday morning, to a four-hour window centered on 1 a.m. UTC on Monday. In the continental U.S., that's Sunday evening. 
 
 ESA previously projected the craft to fall between a vast swath of the planet, including the entirety of Africa, most of South America, the continental U.S. from Boston south, and much of China. "At no time will a precise time/location prediction from ESA be possible," the organization said. 
 
 "Space junk this size falls to Earth a few times a year," NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reported, but "it's usually something like a spent rocket stage — not a home-away-from-home for space travelers." 
 
 That makes this re-entry an interesting one, she says. But it's not particularly dangerous, Bill Ailor, of the Aerospace Corporation's Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies, tells Nell: ||||| CLOSE It was originally planned for a controlled crash on Earth in 2013 and it looks like it's really coming down in 2018. Time 
 
 In this file photo, a Long March 2F rocket carrying China's first space laboratory module Tiangong-1 lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Sept. 29, 2011 in Jiuquan, Gansu province of China. (Photo: Lintao Zhang, Getty Images) 
 
 The first space station built and launched by China will come hurling into Earth as winter ends, according to a recent analysis. 
 
 The Tiangong-1 is predicted to re-enter our atmosphere around March, the federally-funded Aerospace Corporation reports. In 2016, the Chinese stopped receiving data from the station, which is why its re-entry likely won't be controlled. It's hard to pinpoint where the station or its parts will fall, but it's anticipated to land somewhere between 43 degrees North and 43 degrees South latitudes in one of two bands parallel to the equator, Aerospace says. The Northern Hemisphere prediction includes multiple states in the U.S. from northern California to Pennsylvania. 
 
 Apparently, it's not as terrifying as it sounds. 
 
 More: NASA image shows us just how close the Earth and moon really are 
 
 More: SpaceX leases Cape Canaveral location for capsules to take crews to space station 
 
 More: An aerial perspective: 2017 drone images by the USA TODAY Network 
 
 The odds of the 9.4-ton unmanned station crashing into a person is “about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot,” the analysis found. That’s because Earth's atmosphere will likely burn up and break apart some of the 34-foot long mass. 
 
 Also, after years of space exploration, only one person, Lottie Williams of Tulsa, Oklahoma, has ever been recorded being struck by spacecraft debris. A piece of the Delta II rocket hit her on the shoulder in 1996. She wasn't seriously injured. 
 
 What is concerning is that a “highly” toxic substance called hydrazine could survive re-entry. Don’t touch unknown substances on the ground and avoid inhaling fumes, Aerospace warns. 
 
 If you see anything unusual come March (like bright streaks moving across the sky in the same direction), you can report a re-entry sighting on the Aerospace website. 
 
 Follow Ashley May on Twitter: @AshleyMayTweets 
 
 Read or Share this story: https://usat.ly/2lU0UyU
– Look up and you might see a bird, a plane, or 200-pound chunks of China's space lab falling from the sky. Actually, the chance of that last one is remote, but technically possible, and now more than ever. China acknowledged last year that its Tiangong-1 lab, launched in 2011, was likely to plunge toward Earth this year or next. As the Orlando Sentinel explains, it's time to start keeping an eye skyward because the 9-ton craft has dropped below 185 miles in altitude, and things will only start accelerating from here. (You can actually track the craft here; the altitude level fluctuates.) China has narrowed the time frame of the final descent to somewhere between now and April 2018, and while most of the lab is expected to burn up in the atmosphere, astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell tells the Guardian that chunks weighing about 200 pounds could make it through. China says it will alert the UN when the craft begins its descent, but the astrophysicist says six or seven hours is the most notice we can expect. Still, it's all but impossible to figure out where any debris might land, given that a tiny change in atmospheric conditions could move it "from one continent to the next," McDowell says. The odds are in your favor, however. No injuries have ever been reported as a result of falling spacecraft, despite the crashing of the Soviet Union's Salyut 7 space station in 1991 and the fall of NASA's 85-ton Skylab in 1979. China might be concerned, however, with what the failure of Tiangong-1, or "Heavenly Palace," means for its progress in the "new space race," per Wired. (Still, China might be heading to the moon.)