China's Tiangong-1 space station, launched in 2011, is falling to Earth, and the European Space Agency estimates it will crash and burn between March 31 and April 2, though the April 1 disintegration date is "highly variable." Tiangong-1 ("Heavenly Palace-1") hosted two crews of Chinese astronauts, or taikonauts, in 2012 and 2013, but it has actually been orbiting out of control since at least June 2016. Whenever it finally enters the atmosphere, "most of it, though not all, should burn up during the fiery re-entry," NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce says. For the parts that don't, "the possible impact zone covers about two-thirds of the globe, including a lot of the continental United States."
In its animated simulation of the crash, USA Today says that debris from Tiangong-1 could fall anywhere from Oregon to Connecticut, though the odds of anyone being injured by falling metal is incredibly small.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Parker Palm Springs review: decadence in the California desertThe Week Recommends This over-the-top hotel is a mid-century modern gem
-
The real story behind the Stanford Prison ExperimentThe Explainer 'Everything you think you know is wrong' about Philip Zimbardo's infamous prison simulation
-
Is it safe for refugees to return to Syria?Talking Point European countries rapidly froze asylum claims after Assad's fall but Syrian refugees may have reason not to rush home
-
US won its war on 'murder hornets,' officials saySpeed Read The announcement comes five years after the hornets were first spotted in the US
-
Dark energy data suggest Einstein was rightSpeed Read Albert Einstein's 1915 theory of general relativity has been proven correct, according to data collected by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
-
New DNA tests of Pompeii dead upend popular storiesSpeed Read An analysis of skeletal remains reveals that some Mount Vesuvius victims have been wrongly identified
-
NASA's Europa Clipper blasts off, seeking an oceanSpeed Read The ship is headed toward Jupiter on a yearslong journey
-
Detailed map of fly's brain holds clues to human mindSpeed Read This remarkable fruit fly brain analysis will aid in future human brain research
-
Blind people will listen to next week's total eclipseSpeed Read While they can't see the event, they can hear it with a device that translates the sky's brightness into music
-
Melting polar ice is messing with global timekeepingSpeed Read Ice loss caused by climate change is slowing the Earth's rotation
-
An amphibian that produces milk?speed read Caecilians, worm-like amphibians that live underground, produce a milk-like substance for their hatchlings
