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Chinese Space Station Burns Up On Re-entry in South Pacific (reviewjournal.com)

Posted by msmash on from the that's-it-folks dept.

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.

6 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Lucky as expected. by hcs_$reboot · · Score: 2

    Not even "lucky", harming someone would have been very unlucky.

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  2. UTC+8 by konohitowa · · Score: 5, Informative

    That 08:15 would be Chinese time (UTC+8),

    breaking apart and burning up in the skies over the southern Pacific Ocean at about 8:16 p.m. EDT (0016 April 2 GMT), according to the U.S. Strategic Command's Joint Force Space Component Command (JFSCC).

    https://www.space.com/40101-china-space-station-tiangong-1-crashes.html

  3. Re:Suspect the Chinese have some spare fuel left by Joce640k · · Score: 2

    Right, they could plan that because they were 100% certain that all the fuel and thrusters would survive re-entry.

    Uhuh.

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  4. Re:And nothing of value lost by DigiShaman · · Score: 2

    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 :)

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  5. I blame systemd by jfdavis668 · · Score: 4, Funny

    They probably lost communications with it during a systemd patch update.

  6. Re:Lucky as expected. by XXongo · · Score: 2
    Yes, we tend to forget that most of the world is ocean, and most of the ocean is "the middle of the Pacific far from anywhere".

    And, even beyond that, really most of the world that isn't ocean is uninhabited desert or scrubland or tundra.

    Hitting a place that has people when you have an object hitting the Earth untargetted is actually quite unlikely.