Community Corner

Chinese Space Station Could Crash In Midwest States

The Tiangong-1 was decommissioned in 2016 and is expected to fall to earth in the U.S. heartland sometime in late March or early April.

A Chinese space lab known as Tiangong-1 that launched nearly seven years ago is expected to re-enter the earth's atmosphere in the coming days and nobody knows for sure where it will crash — although experts believe it will likely happen in the Midwestern United States, specifically in Illinois, Iowa Indiana and Wisconsin. But in case you're worried about being hit with the space debris, the experts at Aerospace Corp. say there's little cause for concern.

In a March 13 tweet, Aerospace said the odds of a piece of Tiangong-1 harming someone are "vanishingly small," and your odds of being hit by the debris are a million times smaller than your odds of winning the Powerball jackpot.

Expert opinions differ a bit on exactly when and where Tiangong-1 — which translates to "heavenly palace" — will wind up landing. Aerospace predicts the space lab will re-enter the atmosphere around April 1, while the European Space Agency thinks it will happen between March 30 and April 6.

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A map from Aerospace predicts the most likely spots for the Tiangong-1 to land include most of Illinois and Indiana, nearly all of Iowa and the southern tip of Wisconsin.

The space lab launched in September 2011 but was decommissioned and de-orbited in 2016, according to Popular Mechanics. It was replaced with the Tiangong-2 and was originally predicted to fall back to earth in 2017, a timeline that has since been revised, according to Time Magazine.

Find out what's happening in Shelby-Uticawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

If some of the Tiangong-1 should fall onto your property and you were hoping to cash in, we've got some bad news for you. Going near pieces of the fallen space lab could actually be hazardous to your health, and you should contact local authorities if you spot any debris.

A Long March 2F rocket carrying the country's first space laboratory module Tiangong-1 lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on September 29, 2011 in Jiuquan, Gansu province of China. The unmanned Tiangong-1 will stay in orbit for two years and dock with China's Shenzhou-8, -9 and -10 spacecraft with the eventual goal of establishing a manned Chinese space station around 2020. (Photo by Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)


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