China’s Tiangong-1 Space Station re-entered Earth’s atmosphere around 8:15 AM Monday(8:15 p.m. ET Sunday). It crashed into South-Pacific in a fiery fall, the Chinese Space Agency said.
The out of control, bus-szed (40 foot long) Tiangong-1 or Heavenly Palace is China’s high profile projects which was launched in September 2011 as a prototype for a fully functional permanent space station that is expected to launch by 2022.
Tiangong-1 mission was supposed to be ended in 2013 but the Agency kept extending the mission.Soon, the space agency stopped receiving signals from it. China had originally planned to make a controlled re-entry, but ever since it stopped sending data back to earth, it was put into sleep mode.
But the Chinese government told the United Nations in May 2017 that its space lab had “ceased functioning” in March 2016, without saying exactly why.This was embarrassing for China, but it did not stop them from launching another space station, Tiangong-2 in September 2016
However, the descent posed no threat to any lives, as chances of being hit by the debris are minuscule. Read more on the same here.
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