A space station about the size of a bus is in a decaying orbit, descending to lower and lower altitudes in the sky. It will keep falling until it hits enough atmosphere to rip apart and burn up. China's Tiangong-1, meaning "Celestial Palace," is expected to crash back into Earth sometime between Saturday March 31 and Sunday April 1, according to the latest estimate from ESA.

As of this morning, Tiangong-1 was orbiting between 178 and 189 km (117 mi.) in altitude, having descended 7 km in the past 24 hours. When the space station reaches about 70 km, it will be torn apart and incinerated as it streaks through the atmosphere.

Radar images of Tiangong-1. Fraunhofer FHR

It is possible that parts of the space station make it through the atmosphere and impact the ground, though it is highly unlikely that anyone will be hit or injured. When Tiangong-1 breaks apart, a trail of debris could scatter pieces hundreds of kilometers apart. If you are lucky enough to be in the right spot at the right time, you could see parts of the spacecraft burning up in the atmosphere, similar to a meteor shower.

Astronomers and national space agencies are closely tracking the station, though in the final days leading up to reentry, it is impossible to say exactly where it will fall. Numerous factors influence the rate of the space station's descent, and ESA today had to modify its estimates because a storm of solar particles was not as strong as anticipated. As the spacecraft descends, the atmospheric drag affecting it will grow stronger, and the rate of descent will increase.

The station could enter the atmosphere anywhere between latitude 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south, the edges of its orbit. Therefore, Tiangong-1 could crash on any continent except for Antarctica, though it is most likely to reenter the atmosphere over the ocean.

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The lines on this map are where #Tiangong1 can come down within the current +- 1-day uncertainty window.

Cities with populations > 1 million people are also marked on the map, and those on the lines could see a reentry over them. The risk to these cities is however *very small* pic.twitter.com/QFnoLx1dbV — Dr Marco Langbroek (@Marco_Langbroek) March 28, 2018

Tiangong-1, a prototype space station that taikonauts last visited in June 2013, is not the first space station to undergo an uncontrolled reentry into Earth's atmosphere. It's also fairly small for a space station, with a mass of only 8.5 metric tons. There are dozens of larger spacecraft that have crashed back down to Earth. Skylab, the United States' first space station, had a mass of about 76 metric tons, and it reentered the atmosphere in 1979 without causing any harm or damage. A Russian space station with a mass of roughly 39 metric tons called Salyut 7 (DOS-6), which predates Mir, also went through an uncontrolled reentry and burned up in February 1991.

Tiangong-1 was launched in September 2011, and China's first space station served as an orbiting science laboratory and experimental platform for docking spacecraft. After three missions to Tiangong-1 over the course of about a year and a half, two with crews of taikonauts, China retired the station. The nation's space agency lost control of the craft in 2016. China has since launched another space station, Tiangong-2, which is a second testbed for space technologies with the ultimate goal of constructing a large modular space station in the early 2020s.

The first Celestial Palace will not be for much longer, but we down here on Earth should have nothing to fear when it comes crashing back down.

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