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No April Fools': Chinese space station crashes into Southern Pacific

The unmanned Tiangong-1 re-entered the atmosphere at 5:16 p.m. Pacific time, according to officials.
Credit: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images
A Long March 2F rocket carrying the country's first space laboratory module Tiangong-1 lifts off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on September 29, 2011 in Jiuquan, Gansu province of China.

A 9.4-ton Chinese space station about the size of a school bus crashed back to Earth over the southern Pacific Ocean Sunday evening, experts said.

The unmanned Tiangong-1 re-entered the atmosphere at 5:16 p.m. Pacific time, the U.S. government's Joint Force Space Component Command said in a statement. There was no immediate update on whether any of the space station's debris landed on any populated areas.

Anyone who sees what could be debris from the station known as "Heavenly Place: should not touch it or inhale its fumes, Aerospace Corp. warns. The station carried hydrazine, a highly toxic rocket fuel.

Before the re-entry, when and where the 34-foot long space station landed was largely a mystery, because the Chinese stopped receiving data from it in 2016.

The China Manned Space Engineering Office, attempting to assuage concerns that the crash could result in damage or deaths, said Sunday that the Tiangong-1 space station would mostly likely burn up before it hits, the South China Morning Post reported.

The manned space office said the main structure will burn up from the heat and friction. Any debris that reaches the ground will be “floating down at a very slow speed due to their small mass," the report said.

The space station is not likely to affect aviation activities, the report added.

The odds of being hit by part of Tiangong-1 are less than of winning the Powerball lottery — and those odds are about 1 in 292 million.

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