An uncontrolled Chinese space station weighing at least seven tonnes is set to break up as it hurtles to Earth on or around April 1, the European Space Agency has forecast.
"It will mostly burn up due to the extreme heat generated by its high-speed passage through the atmosphere," it said in a statement.
Some debris from the Tiangong-1 -- or "Heavenly Palace" -- spacelab will likely fall into the ocean or somewhere on land, but the chances of human injury are vanishingly small, said Stijn Lemmens, an ESA space debris expert based in Darmstadt, Germany.
"Over the past 60 years of space flight, we are nearing the mark of 6,000 uncontrolled reentries of large objects, mostly satellites and upper (rocket) stages," he told AFP.
More than 90 per cent of those bits of high-tech space junk weighed 100 kilos (220 pounds) or more.
"Only one event actually produced a fragment which hit a person, and it did not result in injury."
Yesterday, China's state-run news agency Xinhua cited the agency as saying the spacelab "should be fully burnt as it reenters the Earth's atmosphere."
"It can be surmised that Tiangong-1 will break up during its atmospheric reentry and that some parts will survive the process and reach the surface of Earth."
"What we really fear is the so-called 'Kessler Syndrome', whereby objects collide in an exponential cascade, with one collision causing thousands of fragments that in turn start colliding with others."
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