New reports have indicated that China has allegedly lost control of its Tiangong-1 space station, leaving it on a collision trajectory with Earth.
It’s been an interesting week in space; NASA has pledged to destroy its Juno space station to avoid pollution, the agency has reportedly deactivated the feed of the International Space Station, and now news suggests that China has lost control of its Tiangong-1 space station.
Amateur satellite tracker Thomas Dorman first reported the cessation of communication between China’s Command and Control Center in Beijing and the Tiangong-1 satellite.
Read: NASA will purposefully destroy its Juno spacecraft to avoid pollution
Tiangong-1 – it’s name translated to English being ‘Heavenly Place’ – was launched in 2011 and served as China’s first space laboratory as a manned module. The space station was deprecated earlier this year in March after the station completed its schedule orbit of 1,630 days.
The station has been reported to behaving erratically, and is apparently unresponsive to ground control. The situation has sparked a level of fear, as should the station re-enter Earth’s atmosphere at an uncontrolled trajectory, harmful pieces of debris could shower settled regions of the globe.
T.S. Kelso, a senior research astrodynamicist at the Center for Space Standards and Innovation expressed skepticism at the news, stating that “I guess I would want to see some very specific data, notionally covering a period where Tiangong-1 was supposed to be stable, to show that it is now uncontrolled, before reading too much more into this.”
Kelso further stated that “The suggestion has been made [that] the reason China hasn’t done a re-entry of Tiangong-1 is, the space station is low on fuel, and China is waiting on a natural decay to a much lower orbit before they can do a burn to bring the station down.”
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There is, however, a likelihood that China could wait until the last possible moment to declare any state of emergency aboard the station.
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Follow Bryan Smith on Twitter: @bryansmithSA
Source: Space.com
