China space lab mostly burns up on re-entry in south Pacific

BEIJING (AP) — China's defunct Tiangong 1 space station mostly burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere over the central South Pacific on Monday, Chinese space authorities said. The Tiangong-1 made re-entry over the Pacific Ocean around 8:15 a.m. Beijing time (8:15 p.m. Sunday EST), with most of its parts burning up before crashing into the southern Pacific Ocean, the China Manned Space Agency said in a statement. Scientists monitoring the craft’s disintegrating orbit had forecast the craft would mostly burn up and would pose only the slightest of risks to people. The 40-foot, 18,000-lb space lab, whose name means “Heavenly Palace,” was launched in September 2011 with a two-year lifespan to monitor the Earth’s surface temperature, sea ice and vegetation cover, according to the New York Tiangong-1 was also planned as the first step in China’s ambitions to hold a permanent space station in orbit by 2022. The station, whose name translates as “Heavenly Palace,” played host to two crewed missions that included China’s first female astronauts and served as a test platform for perfecting docking procedures and other operations. Chinese scientists lost contact with the station in 2016, severing their ability to control its trajectory, and in May 2017, China announced that that the lab had “ceased functioning” in March 2016 and would be allowed to tumble to Earth. READ MORE: Chinese space station set to come crashing to Earth, but your chance of getting crushed is tiny

Since then, it has orbited gradually closer and closer to Earth on its own while being monitored. Earlier forecasts had said that only about 10 per cent of the bus-sized, 8.5-ton spacecraft would likely survive re-entry, mainly its heavier components such as its engines. Ren Guoqiang, China’s defense ministry spokesman, told reporters Thursday that Beijing has been briefing the United Nations and the international community about Tiangong 1’s re-entry through multiple channels. Debris from satellites, space launches and the International Space Station enters the atmosphere every few months, but only one person is known to have been hit by any of it: American woman Lottie Williams, who was struck but not injured by a falling piece of a U.S. Delta II rocket while exercising in an Oklahoma park in 1997. A mission to land another rover on Mars and bring back samples is set to launch in 2020, while China also plans to become the first country to soft-land a probe on the far side of the moon.
Chinese space station Tiangong-1 crashes into the South Pacific Ocean near Tahiti.