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Chinese Space Station Burns Up On Re-entry in South Pacific (reviewjournal.com)
cold fjord writes: Chinese space authorities say the defunct Tiangong 1 space station mostly burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere over the central South Pacific. The China Manned Space Engineering Office said the experimental space laboratory re-entered around 8:15 a.m. Monday. Scientists monitoring the craft's disintegrating orbit had forecast the craft would mostly burn up and would pose only the slightest of risks to people. Analysis from the Beijing Aerospace Control Center showed it had mostly burned up. 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. Two crews of Chinese astronauts lived on the station while testing docking procedures and other operations. Its last crew departed in 2013 and contact with it was cut in 2016.
Good that it was like skylab no harm to anyone.
Not even "lucky", harming someone would have been very unlucky.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
That 08:15 would be Chinese time (UTC+8),
https://www.space.com/40101-china-space-station-tiangong-1-crashes.html
The Chinese send a lot of stuff into space. That's maybe why sometimes some get out of control.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Sending is not the hard part anymore.
Buying the secrets of staying in space is the challenge for China.
Who to approach in Russia, the former Soviet Union, the USA with space job offer.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Right, they could plan that because they were 100% certain that all the fuel and thrusters would survive re-entry.
Uhuh.
No sig today...
just burn a little sooner, before they would get damaged... when it starts to enter the atmosphere, to give it a little push
Higuita
yeh, right!!! just because those two never had SEVERAL satellites with uncontrolled re-entry
Higuita
The secret to staying in space is actually wanting your object to stay in space, and not designing the mission to de-orbit soon.
Of course, doing that with an experimental station that's only in use briefly would be irresponsible. Nobody wants objects remaining in space beyond their useful lifetime, it's always best if they can be crashed into the atmosphere.
This space intentionally left blank
Don't forget to get back Sandra Bullock. She's ours!
Hope Patti LuPone wasn't in the cast.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
The whole point of the uncontrolled re-entry was that they had no communication link, thus no control over the vessel.
I dunno man, I'm sure someone out in the desert is just waiting to catch spacejunk to hawk on E-Bay :)
Props to anyone that catches the reference :)
Life is not for the lazy.
They probably lost communications with it during a systemd patch update.
Even minutes before the splash-down Western authorities were saying that the Tiangong-1 spaceship was aiming for the Atlantic, off the coast of Brazil, at 00:49 GMT, or so
No. I was following this one, and most of the authorities were actually saying we don't know exactly where it will hit, here's the latest update and the best guess for impact, which was always a wide range.
At the very end they were saying "it will enter on this orbit, here's the ground track"-- and the final orbit's ground track passed over the South Atlantic, continued over South Africa, and went on to the Pacific. Where on that final orbit it would hit depended very sensitively on exaclty how it was oriented and how much drag and how early it would start to break apart, something difficult to predict for a relatively simple satellite and very very hard to estimate for something as complex as Taingong-1. Nobody was giving exact predictions "it will land here."
I mean, why does a musical need crashing burning space stations???
More likely tainted stolen tech that was planted to be found by the Chinese.