Farewell, Tiangong-1: Chinese Space Station meets fiery doom over South Pacific

Tiangong-1 is no more.

China's prototype space station, whose name translates as "Heavenly Palace 1," met a fiery end in Earth's atmosphere today (April 1), breaking apart and burning up in the skies over the southern Pacific Ocean at about 8:16 p.m. EDT (0016 April 2 GMT), according to the U.S. Strategic Command's Joint Force Space Component Command (JFSCC).

"The JFSCC used the Space Surveillance Network sensors and their orbital analysis system to confirm Tiangong-1's re-entry," U.S. Air Force officials wrote in a statement.

Some pieces of the school-bus-size Tiangong-1 almost certainly survived the fall, but the odds that they caused any damage or injury are extremely small: You had a less than 1-in-1-trillion chance of getting hit by a flaming chunk of the heavenly palace, according to experts with the Aerospace Corporation.

By the way, if you do manage to find such a chunk of Tiangong-1, don't pick it up or breathe in any fumes emanating from it. The space junk may be contaminated with hydrazine, a toxic rocket fuel, experts have said.

Tiangong-1 was about 34 feet long by 11 feet wide (10.4 by 3.4 meters), and it weighed more than 9 tons (8 metric tons). The space lab consisted of two main parts: an "experimental module" that housed visiting astronauts and a "resource module" that accommodated Tiangong-1's solar-energy and propulsion systems.

The craft launched without anyone aboard on Sept. 29, 2011, to an orbit about 217 miles (350 kilometers) above Earth. That's slightly lower than the orbit of the much larger International Space Station, whose average altitude is 250 miles (400 km). Tiangong-1's main mission was to help China master the technologies required to assemble and operate a bona-fide space station in Earth orbit, a goal the nation aims to achieve by the early 2020s, the country has said.

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