Just kidding! Happy April Fool's Day!

In reality, Tiangong-1 re-entered Earth's atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean on April 1 at 8:16 pm EDT. Since it was daylight at that time over the Pacific, there were no sightings of the craft burning up as it hit the Earth's atmosphere, nor sightings of it hitting the water. The return was confirmed by the U.S. Strategic Command’s (USSTRATCOM) Joint Force Space Component Command in a press release.

This was an uncontrolled descent, since China had apparently lost contact with the station in 2016. The Chinese craft was about 1/10^th the size of Skylab, the U.S. space station that had a well-known, uncontrolled descent back on July 11, 1979. In the case of Skylab, pieces of the space station survived re-entry and fell to ground in Western Australia.

In the case of Tiangong-1, while a non-controlled descent, it came to earth “in a good place,” over the South Pacific, northwest of Tahiti and far from any of the Pacific Islands or any other land. This was fortunate, given the fact that an expected 10 to 40 percent of Tiangong-1 was expected to survive the fires of re-entry. And while the odds of being struck by a piece of falling space debris are on the order of one trillion to one, it’s best when such space debris comes to rest far from land.

(Header photo taken by Fraunhofer FHR space observation radar – it's a radar view of Tiangong-1, not a picture of it burning)

Interested in learning more breaking space news? LSC Space News Now appears at the end of each Wonders of the Night Sky show. Click here to see our full list of shows in the Jennifer Chalsty Planetarium, the largest and most technologically advanced planetarium in the Western Hemisphere.