“Russia refused to give details, and offered just $3 million. “They exchanged diplomatic letters with Russia referring to the Liability Convention,” said Cassandra Steer, acting executive director of Center for Ethics and Rule of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. The Union of Concerned Scientists lists 1,459 operating satellites, though another 11,600 float around Earth as space junk. They also sought $6 million in compensation from the Soviet Union. No one was injured, but given the potential for radioactive contamination, Canada felt compelled to launch a cleanup mission, Operation Morning Light. Such was the case in 1978, when a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite - Cosmos 954 - sprinkled debris over 370 miles of Canada’s Northwest territories. Only governments can make claims against another government. But under the treaty’s terms, you cannot personally seek compensation from China or any other nation. That means if Tiangong-1 did strike your property, your sole means of recourse would be the Space Liability Convention, an international treaty ratified in 1972 by the United Nations. “So they’re assigned to a country, not a company.” “The interesting thing about satellites is even though a large proportion are commercial, all satellites are considered national activities,” Grego said. Still, only one person in history - Lottie Williams of Tulsa, Oklahoma - has been hit on the ground by falling space debris. Those especially have a tendency to survive,” Langbroek said. “There are pressure spheres and fuel tanks on these kinds of space stations. One example is hydrazine, a highly toxic and corrosive substance used as spacecraft fuel. It’s unclear what hazardous materials might have been inside Tiangong-1, she said.
“You shouldn’t go run over and smell it.” “You shouldn’t go run over and smell it, and you probably shouldn’t go pick it up,” said Laura Grego, a physicist and global security expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists. So, in the event that a remnant of Tiangong-1 lands in your backyard or destroys your car, here’s a guide to what you should do. And pieces of rocket engines possess a higher likelihood of survival.īased on Langbroek’s calculations and those made by the European Space Agency, Tiangong-1’s surviving parts are most likely to land in the ocean, but they could also hit anywhere across “the whole of Africa, Australia, New Zealand and the southern parts of Europe and Asia, South America and United States,” Langbroek said. While much of the space station will break apart and burn during re-entry, scientists at the European Space Agency expect between 20 to 40 percent - 1.5 to 4 tons - of Tiangong-1 to survive the fiery plummet because the space station is so big. “Only in the hours directly before the real re-entry can we narrow this window down to tens of minutes,” Dutch satellite tracker Marco Langbroek told the PBS NewsHour. (You can track the descent here and here). Map by Marco LangbroekĪs of March 30, scientists predict Tiangong-1 will make its final plunge on April Fool’s Day, but there is a 14-hour window of uncertainty. Cities with populations larger than 1 million people between the target latitudes are marked in red, and cities near a projected trajectory are marked in white. The lines on this map show where Tiangong-1 could come down. If the Tiangong-1 spreads these materials over thousands of miles, the risks of injury and environmental damage are still high. And the risk encompasses more than just being struck by space debris, due to the hazardous materials potentially inside the space station. While your chances of being hit by a piece of Tiangong-1 are tiny - 10 million times less than your chances of being hit by lightning this year - the risk will be impossible to calculate until its final descent begins. In low-Earth orbit, the air is still thick enough to create drag and bring down the wayward station. Though our atmosphere becomes thinner as you increase altitude, its upper limit is 6,200 miles above sea level. Since then, the school bus-sized station has tumbled through space, gradually slowing and falling out of orbit due to atmospheric drag.
But in March 2016, Tiangong-1 unexpectedly stopped working, according to a letter filed to the United Nations. The last astronauts departed the 10-ton station in June 2013, and Chinese officials put the space station into sleep mode, expecting it would remain operational until they could facilitate a controlled re-entry. It launched in 2011 with a two-year mission. Though its name means “heavenly palace,” the space station, named Tiangong-1, lasted only five years before malfunctioning. A Chinese space station is tumbling uncontrollably toward Earth, and no one will know where its pieces will land until hours before it gets here.
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