China's space station has been falling back to Earth for two years, and now its estimated crash date is between March 29 and April 9, but the odds of Tiangong-1 hitting you are worse than you hitting the Powerball jackpot.
Tiangong-1, or Heavenly Palace 1, first launched in 2011, stopped functioning in March 2016, the website EarthSky.org reported, when China's space agency's lost control because the engines could no longer be fired.
The European Space Agency said on Tuesday that an updated analysis showed its window of entry is from the late March to early April dates, but those were "highly variable."
"Reentry will take place anywhere between 43 degrees N and 43 degrees S (e.g. Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, etc.)," the ESA said on its blog. "Areas outside of these latitudes can be excluded. At no time will a precise time/location prediction from ESA be possible."
Popular Mechanics magazine reported this week that the station's current orbital path, whether in the Northern Hemisphere or Southern Hemisphere, puts parts of the United States, the Iberian Peninsula, China, the Middle East, South America, Australia, and New Zealand into play as potential reentry locations.
Aerospace Corp., which has been monitoring the Tiangong-1, said some of the space station won’t burn up during reentry, leaving the possibility of small parts hitting the Earth's surface.
"Should this happen, any surviving debris would fall within a region that is a few hundred kilometers in size and centered along a point on the Earth that the station passes over," Aerospace Corp. said
"… When considering the worst-case location … the probability that a specific person (i.e., you) will be struck by Tiangong-1 debris is about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot. In the history of spaceflight, no known person has ever been harmed by reentering space debris. Only one person has ever been recorded as being hit by a piece of space debris and, fortunately, she was not injured."
China launched Tiangong-1 as a laboratory and experimental space station to test spacecraft docking hardware and capabilities, Popular Mechanics said.