Tiangong-1 falls to Earth - In March 🌍

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It is well known that the Tiangong-1 (in Chinese, the celestial palace)is out of control and that its destiny is to crash to the ground . Now we know that the return to the atmosphere will occur in mid-March 2018 and that the few pieces that will survive the heat of re-entry into the atmosphere will impact in an area between the 43rd parallel north and the 43rd parallel south.

DO NOT PANIC

The chances of being hit by a space debris, particularly from a Tiangong-1 fragment, are absurdly low .
The Chinese module weighs "only" 8,500 kg and, as happens with falling stars, for the most part it will disintegrate due to friction with the atmosphere. Moreover, the geographical area in question is mainly covered by oceans and deserts, in this same area there are a good part of the United States, Brazil, India and China itself.

UNPREDICTABLE

The latest available data suggest that the space station's orbit has dropped about 100 km since September 2016: now the average height of the Tiangong -1 from the ground is 287 km. The closer it gets to the upper layers of the atmosphere, the more it will be slowed by the friction with the air. For an object in orbit, decreasing speed also means lowering altitude, which will expose the satellite to even greater friction.
As you can not guess which number will end the roulette ball before it starts to fall, it is still impossible to predict exactly where and when the station will fall. But, monitoring it, it will be possible to know its trajectory more than 6 hours before the impact on the ground.

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DELICATE DEBRIS

To date, in the history of falling out of control, only one person was hit by a space debris: Lottie Williams, while walking through a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was hit on the shoulder by a piece of metal 15 cm long. The impact was like that of an empty can , tells the woman - unharmed and excited after having collected what she thought was a piece of the shooting star that had just noticed in the sky.
The NASA then identified "the shooting star" with the second stage of a Delta II rocket crashed in Texas: the slight metal fragment that hit the woman would be a part of it.

RANDOM

Space stations much larger than the Tiangong -1 have already fallen on the Earth without hitting anyone, but it was always controlled re -entry where the debris was dropped into the ocean. This time, however, the case will decide.

References for Further Reading

SPACE FLIGHT INSIDER

CNN