Space News: The Chinese Space Station That May Be Coming To Your Backyard

The Tiangong-1 Space Station has reached its end-of-life and will be re-entering the Earth's atmosphere in the next few weeks.

No one currently knows when and where it will re-enter the atmosphere because the prediction capability for atmospheric re-entries is not very exact until a few hours before the event actually happens.

At the time of this posting it means the re-entry could be anywhere along the station's orbital path.

Cause For Alarm?

Probably not. Most of the components of the 8500 kg station are expected to burn up on re-entry but there is speculation that the rocket engines are too dense and too robust to fully burn up.

These rocket engines have a mass of about 100 kg so could possibly do some damage on impact.

The orbital inclination of the defunct station is about 43° so if you live north of 43°N or south of 43°S then you are completely out of its range.

Where Is It Now?

The current place in orbit for the station can be found at this site here. It can be found at others as well just by searching for "Tiangong-1 tracking", many good sites come up in the search results.

A Bit About Satellite Re-Entry Predictions

The atmospheric entry time for an uncontrolled satellite orbit decay is very hard to predict.

This is not the fault of the math or the knowledge about orbital mechanics. The reason is mostly because as the satellite's orbit drops it starts to enter the upper reaches of the atmosphere.

The density of these upper reaches can vary by a lot due to many factors (space weather etc.) and this will change the drag on the space craft. Add in to this the complex aerodynamic effects of a non-aerodynamic satellite and the error bars get very large, very fast.

Closing Words

The likelihood of any surviving pieces hitting you, or anyone at all for that matter, is extremely small so this is not something that you need to worry about.

Nevertheless, for entertainment purposes, I intend to watch the tracking sites at the time of re-entry if I can.

Thank you for reading my post.