Tiangong-1, the decommissioned Chinese space station, could make an April Fools' Day re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere, researchers have predicted.
The Chinese space station launched in 2011 but was later decommissioned and deorbited after being replaced by the Tiangong-2, Popular Mechanics reported.
China lost control of the station in 2016, making it impossible to pinpoint the exact date of re-entry or location of landing, but as the falling space station drops lower in its orbit, experts can start to predict this information.
The European Space Agency expects Tiangong-1 to make its descent to Earth sometime between March 30 and April 6 and Aerospace has forecast re-entry on April 1, or within four days of that date, KABC-TV said.
Predicting the landing location is a little trickier to do, according to Aerospace, which noted that Tiangong-1 could re-enter "somewhere between 43° North and 43° South latitudes," but that an accurate location prediction could not be determined "until shortly before the reentry has occurred."
Wu Ping, deputy director of the manned space engineering office, dismissed concerns that the uncontrolled space station crashing down to Earth would pose any serious risks.
"Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling," she said, assuring that aviation activities would not be impacted, nor would there be any damages caused by debris, Xinhua News Agency noted.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, echoed these thoughts.
"The actual danger is small, but it is accepted international best practice nowadays that objects that big shouldn't be able to fall out of the sky in this manner," he said, according to CNN.
There may be no imminent danger surrounding Tiangong-1's re-entry however, Popular Mechanics noted that it could be a spectacle worth seeing when the space station enters Earth's atmosphere.
A spectacular fireball might be seen shooting through the sky as the space station makes its way to the ground.
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