Tiangong-1 came crashing down to Earth this morning, in what was a fiery end to the Chinese space station.

Earlier, experts had predicted Tiangong-1 would crash at around 7.30am Monday morning (CST). Their estimates weren't very far off — the 8.5 tonne space laboratory was believed to have re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at around 8.15am, according to China's Manned Space Engineering Office. Specialists at the at the US Joint Force Space Component Command confirmed the re-entry.

Most of Tiangong-1's parts likely broke up and disintegrated during a fiery re-entry process, but it's not clear yet if any debris actually hit the Earth's surface. Any debris that did make it "will be at the bottom of the ocean by now," a former astronaut told CNN.

One of the final radar images of Tiangong-1, captured before its fiery descent.

Just prior to Tiangong-1's final demise, China's space agency incorrectly predicted that it would break up somewhere near Sao Paulo, Brazil in the Atlantic Ocean. Instead, most news reports suggest that the space station instead crashed somewhere over the south Pacific — just missing the infamous "spacecraft graveyard," according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics:

Launched back in 2011, Tiangong-1 — translated in English as "Heavenly Palace" — was originally expected to come back down to Earth in a controlled crash in 2013, however the mission was later extended. The station welcomed Liu Yang, China's first female astronaut, aboard in 2012.

By March of 2016 however, a senior official of the manned space program revealed that authorities had lost control of the space station. The UN was originally notified of an expected (but uncontrollable) reentry between October 2017 and April 2018.

Tiangong-1 in better days.

Though the Earth is surrounded by tons of space debris that commonly falls to Earth, uncontrolled descents are considered against best international practice.

[Images via BBC, Space.com]

You May Also Like...

Click "Read more" (阅读原文) below for more China News.