THE CHINESE SPACE LABORATORY COULD FALL DOWN THIS WEEKEND

But they say that the chances of their remains impacting a person are minimal

The Chinese space laboratory Tiangong-1 was launched in 2011 and, now, is about to rush on our planet. Initially it had been foreseen that the reentry would take place in mid-April, but later calculations pointed to the fact that, since its speed had accelerated, it would do so at the beginning of that month. But, now, it is believed that this could happen this weekend. Although the most important question is still: where will it fall?

It is really impossible to know exactly, but some calculations have pointed to possible areas of impact (although the possibility of falling into them is still remote), one of which includes the north of the Iberian Peninsula. Despite this, specialists point out that there is no reason to be alarmed, since the danger that a rest of the laboratory will fall on someone is a million times even smaller than that of the Euromillion.

It is expected that most of the laboratory will disintegrate when entering the atmosphere but, even so, it is estimated that some remains of this mass of almost nine tons of weight would survive this process and, therefore, numerous metal fragments of different size will fall on the surface of our planet.

This news brings to mind the case of Skylab, the first US space station that was launched in 1973. And on July 11, 1979, its fragments fell on the Australian desert. The authorities of that country imposed on NASA a symbolic fine of 400 dollars for throwing garbage on its territory.