China's out-of-control space station set to smash down somewhere in the US or Europe next year

The European Space Agency is carefully tracking where the Tiangong-1 is going crash down
Space experts are hard at work tracking the crash site of China's out-of-control Tiangong-1 space station.

The 8.5-tonne craft is on a collision course with Earth since the country lost control of it in 2016. Although the space community has known about the incoming crash for a while, figuring out where it will splash down is proving tricky.

The European Space Agency (ESA) got a little bit closer this week with a new estimate.

“Owing to the geometry of the station’s orbit, we can already exclude the possibility that any fragments will fall over any spot further north than 43ºN or further south than 43ºS,” Holger Krag, head of the ESA’s Space Debris Office told Newsweek .

“This means that reentry may take place over any spot on Earth between these latitudes, which includes several European countries, for example.”

Going on those predictions, the debris from Tiangong-1 could scatter over cities like LA, New York or even European countries like France, Spain or Italy.

As for a time frame, the best estimates put the date of the crash as February 2018.

While the majority of the space station will be destroyed upon re-entry Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist based at Harvard University, has warned that there could still be chunks (some as much as 100kg) that stay intact.

The Tiangong-1 space station is capable of housing three astronauts but it's real purpose was to serve as a prototype station for China's forthcoming space endevours.

The country already has its successor - Tiangong-2 - in orbit around the planet.

Further sections will be added to Tiangong-2 in future to form a modular structure, similar to the International Space Station.