China National Space Administration has announced that its space station, Tiangong-1 has fallen into the Earth’s atmosphere and caught fire on the sky in the South Pacific on 2nd April.
According to Reuters news agency, a brief report on the Web site of the China National Space Administration said that the Tiangong-1 space station has fallen into the Earth’s atmosphere.
China also said that most of the space station caught fire when it began to fall back to Earth’s atmosphere, and said that it is unlikely that the large debris of the Heaven Palace 1 (Tiangong-1 ) could fall to the surface land.
Just before that it was estimated that Tiangong-1 would fall to the atmosphere off the coast of Brazil in the South Atlantic near the cities of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.
The 10.4 meter long Tiangong-1 Space Station was launched in 2011 in Beijing’s ambitious space exploration program with the goal of setting up a fixed space station in orbit in 2023.
According to the original plan, Tiangong-1 is expected to be revived in 2013, but its mission has been continuously extended.
China previously said the space station will return to the ground by the end of 2017, but the process is delayed, leading to speculation that experts have lost control.
Newspaper The Global Times of China today raised the notion that the world’s media have exaggerated about Tiangong-1 space station fell to Earth.
The Chinese Communist Party’s official spokesman even said that the cause of this “hype” was the world’s “jealousy” of China’s achievements in space exploration.