Chinese space station Tiangong-1 finally returned to the Earth’s surface on Sunday evening, crash-landing off the coast of Tahiti at roughly 17,000 miles per hour.
Thankfully no one was hurt.
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“Most parts were burned up in the re-entry process,” China Manned Space Agency told CNN.
The station, which translates to “Heavenly Place”, weighed in at eight metric tons and was 34 feet long when it originally launched in September 2011. The ship climbed to an orbit of 217 miles above the Earth, only slightly lower than the International Space Station at 250 miles.
The craft’s launch was intended for China’s space program to test run a working orbiting space station. The ship’s design lifetime was only set for about two years, according to Space.com, but was kept up in orbit for observational work. However in March 2016 data transmissions between the ship and ground control stopped for reasons Chinese officials cannot explain. As a result, a fiery re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere was expected, and there was no way to determine exactly where it would land until hours prior.
Scientists had been tracking the ship’s trajectory for weeks, and calculated the landing area a day prior to its eventual crash.
“It did exactly what it was expected to do; the predictions, at least the past 24 hours’ ones, were spot on; and as expected it fell somewhere empty and did no damage,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told CNN on Sunday.
Despite the public embarrassment of Tiangong-1’s crash, China’s space program went ahead with the launch of the Tiangong-2 space lab in September 2016, mere months after they lost contact with the original ship.
Sunday’s crash marked the first time a space outpost had made a crash landing on Earth since Russia’s Mir station landed in 2001. Most of the 135-ton craft broke up in the atmosphere.
Elsewhere in space travel news, Elon Musk is hoping to have his SpaceX program have its first voyage to Mars by 2019.
“We are building the first Mars, or interplanetary ship, and I think well [s.i.c.] be able to [do] short trips, flights by first half of next year,” Musk said at the SXSW festival, according to CNBC. “Although sometimes, my timelines are a little, you know…”
“The biggest thing that would be helpful is just general support and encouragement and goodwill,” Musk continued. “I think once we build it we’ll have a point of proof something that other companies and countries can go and do. They certainly don’t think it’s possible, but if we do they’ll up their game.”
Photo: Twitter/@MusafirNamah
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