The wreckage of Chinese space station Tiangong-1 could come crashing down on Europe within months, experts have warned. The 8.5 tonne space station, which been in a decaying orbit since March 2016, is expected to re-enter the atmosphere early next year. According to Express.co.uk, forecasts predict the debris could rain down on several European countries – including Spain, Portugal, Italy, Bulgaria and Greece.
The European Space Agency
will host a campaign to track the descent and reentry of China's doomed
orbiting Tiangong-1 space lab early next year.
According to an ESA press
release, IADC members will use this event to conduct their annual reentry
test campaign, during which participants will pool their predictions of the
time window, as well as respective tracking datasets obtained from radar and
other sources. The aim is to cross-verify, cross-analyse and improve the
prediction accuracy for all members.
IADC comprises space debris
and other experts from 13 space agencies and organisations, including NASA,
ESA, European national space agencies such as CNES and DLR, JAXA of Japan, ISRO
of India, KARI of South Korea, Russia's Roscosmos and the China National Space
Administration (CNSA). The craft will
"inevitably decay sometime between January and March 2018", according
to Holger Krag, head of ESM's Space Debris Office.
He said: "No fragments
will fall over any spot further north than 43 degrees North or further south
than 43 degrees South. Reentry may take place over any spot on Earth between
these latitudes, which includes several European countries, for example. The
date, time and geographic footprint of the re-entry can only be predicted with
large uncertainties. Even shortly before re-entry, only a very large time
and geographical window can be estimated."
Earlier this month, Jonathan
McDowell, an astrophysicist from Harvard University, said the station's orbit
has been steadily decaying.
He warned: "Now that
its perigee is below 300km and it is in denser atmosphere, the rate of decay is
getting higher. I expect it will come down a few months from now – late 2017 or
early 2018. Mr McDowell added a slight change in atmospheric conditions could
nudge the landing site "from one continent to the next".
It is feared chunks of the
station weighing up to 100kg could hit Earth. But Chinese officials have
insisted the debris will pose little threat to people or property.
Wu Ping, of China's manned
space engineering office, said: "Based on our calculation and analysis,
most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling. China has always
highly valued the management of space debris, conducting research and tests on
space debris mitigation and cleaning."
A rendering of the completed Chinese Space Station, including docked Shenzhou and Tianzhou spacecraft. CMSA |
Tiangong-1's successor,
Tiangong-2, was launched in September 2016. Tiangong-1 was also carrying
science payloads including a hyperspectral imager for surveying the Earth's
surface, crystal growth experiments and instruments to detect and analyse solar
energetic particles, atmospheric chemistry and physics, and ionospheric
disturbances.
Tiangong-2,
launched in September last year, built on this success, testing upgraded life
support while hosting China's longest human spaceflight mission so far, using faster rendezvous and docking procedures, and verifying refuelling and resupply technologies in combination with the Tianzhou-1 cargo
spacecraft.
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