Defunct China space lab Tiangong-1 mostly burns up on re-entry in South Pacific

The out of control Chinese space station Tiangong 1 mostly burned up on re-entering the Earth's atmosphere above the South Pacific on April 2, according to Chinese space authorities.

The China Manned Space Engineering Office said that the space lab entered the atmosphere at around 8:15 am Beijing time (05:45 am IST) on Monday.

Launched in 2011 to carry out docking and orbit experiments, Tiangong-1 was part of China’s ambitious plan to build a manned space station by 2022.

However, the satellite Tiangong 1 went out of control in March 2016 and had been floating in the space since then.

According to the US Joint Force Space Component Command, Tiangong 1 mostly broke up above the South Pacific.

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“NW of Tahiti - it managed to miss the 'spacecraft graveyard' which is further south!” Astronomer Jonathan McDowell tweeted.

Earlier, the plan was to bring the space lab back to Earth through a controlled final descent and make it land safely somewhere in the world’s oceans, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).

The Chinese space agency struggled to predict where exactly the space lab would crash and wrongly suggested that it would be off Sao Paulo, Brazil.

However, the ESA had predicted that Tiangong-1 would probably break up over water.

The agency had also said that the chances of anyone being hit by the debris of Tiangong-1 were "10 million times smaller than the yearly chance of being hit by lightning". Click Here For More Science News