[Courtesy of Xinhua News]
China's prototype space lab-station "Tiangong-1" has been out of control in orbit and space experts believe it may crash onto the Earth in the second half of 2017.
The station called "Heavenly Palace" has been orbiting at an altitude of 380 kilometers (236 miles) and traveling at 27,500 kilometers per hour since it was launched into space in September 2011. It had been officially operational until March this year.
The station was to descend slowly after ending its service, but China's space agency admitted it has lost contact. Some experts are worried about its possible crash into a populated place.
The Chinese station is comparably smaller than the football field-sized International Space Station, which is 10 meters (32 feet) long and 3 meters wide.
"The module is predominantly a hollow shell, so there’s a good chance a significant portion will burn up in the atmosphere. But there’s also a chance some elements will survive down to (the) surface," Hugh Lewis, a space debris expert at the University of Southampton, told The Guardian.
Lewis said the odds are in favor of people not being hit by the debris.
In a 1979 case involving NASA's "Skylab" station, most of its parts burnt up during its re-entry over the Indian Ocean, but large chunks fell southeast of Perth, Australia. Nobody was hurt but an Australian town has made a 400 US dollar charge for littering.
Aju News Park Sae-jin = swatchsjp@ajunews.com
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Park Sae-jin
swatchsjp@ajunews.com
