By Lisa Cannon Green
Outdoor worshipers at Easter sunrise services might see more than the dawn of a new day as they look skyward.
A Chinese space station is about to fall to Earth, and the latest prediction has it happening on Easter Sunday, April 1 — or thereabouts.
Chinese officials confirmed in 2016 they’d lost control of the space station, Tiangong-1, which was launched in 2011 and abandoned in 2013 after six missions.
When gravity inexorably draws the crippled space laboratory back to Earth, it’s likely to break into pieces that burn up as they accelerate through the atmosphere.
The burning debris may look like meteors streaking across the sky—but with a difference, says Aerospace Corp., a nonprofit spaceflight research firm.
People who happen to be in the right spot for viewing—and it isn’t clear where that spot will be—may see “multiple bright streaks moving across the sky in the same direction,” according to Aerospace.
The fiery streaks could be visible for a minute or more—much longer than most natural meteors.
And some chunks of the space station may not fully burn up before they collide with Earth.
“Due to the relatively large size of the object, it is expected that there will be many pieces reentering together, some of which may survive reentry and land on the Earth’s surface,” Aerospace says.
But don’t let fear of flying debris scare you out of participating in Easter activities.
Although no one knows exactly where any pieces might land, the likeliest location is the ocean, which covers about 70 percent of the planet’s surface, says Space.com.
Your chances of getting hit are less than 1 in a trillion, according to Aerospace.
And although the space station’s plunge is considered both inevitable and imminent, there’s no certainty it will happen on Easter.
The timing is “highly variable”and could be anywhere between the morning of March 31 and the afternoon of April 1, the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office in Germany says. Aerospace predicts 5:30 a.m. Central Daylight Time on April 1, plus or minus 16 hours.
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LISA CANNON GREEN (@lisacgreen) is senior editor of Facts & Trends.