'Out of control' Chinese space station re-enters Earth's atmosphere
An 'out of control' bus-sized Chinese space station has re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.
Chinese space authorities say the defunct Tiangong 1 landed in the South Pacific, north-west of Tahiti, at about 10.15am AEST.
While most of it burned up in the atmosphere, some pieces of the 8.5-tonne station could have survived the fall, Space.com reported.
However, the odds it caused damage or injury are very small with a less than 1-in-1-trillion chance of a person getting hit by a flaming, according to experts with the Aerospace Corporation.
Launched in 2011, Tiangong 1 was China’s first space station, serving as an experimental platform for bigger projects, such as the Tiangong 2 launched in September 2016 and a future permanent Chinese space station.
The station played host to two crewed missions and served as a test platform for perfecting docking procedures and other operations. Its last crew departed in 2013 and contact with it was cut in 2016.
Defunct Chinese space lab hurtles toward Earth
Queensland on high alert as ex-tropical Cyclone Iris threatens to reform
Since then, it has orbited gradually closer and closer to Earth on its own while being monitored.
Many Western space experts think China had lost control of the station.
China’s chief space laboratory designer, Zhu Zongpeng, has denied Tiangong was out of control, but hasn’t provided specifics on what China was doing to guide the craft’s return to Earth.
