Earth-bound Chinese spacelab plunging to fiery end

An uncontrolled Chinese space station weighing at least seven tonnes is set to break up as it hurtles to Earth on or around April 1, the European Space Agency has forecast. "It will mostly burn up due to the extreme heat generated by its high-speed passage through the atmosphere," it said in a statement. Some debris from the Tiangong-1 - or "Heavenly Palace" - spacelab will likely fall into the ocean or somewhere on land, but the chances of human injury are vanishingly small, said Stijn Lemmens, an ESA space debris expert based in Darmstadt, Germany.
"Over the past 60 years of space flight, we are nearing the mark of 6,000 uncontrolled reentries of large objects, mostly satellites and upper (rocket) stages," he told AFP.
More than 90 percent of those bits of high-tech space junk weighed 100 kilos (220 pounds) or more.
"Only one event actually produced a fragment which hit a person, and it did not result in injury." Lemmens calculated the odds of being struck by space debris at one in 1.2 trillion - 10 million times less likely than getting hit by lightning.