Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–25 of 25 posts

Re: Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months

#21

Post by FussyZeus »

bjourne wrote: post #16
jpatokal wrote: post #13

Missing context: this is working as intended. Tiangong-1 was China's first space station demonstrator ("target vehicle", in official parlance) and barely larger than the Shenzhou spacecraft used to fly there, itself essentially a modernized copy of the 1960s-vintage Soviet Soyuz craft. It has already been succeeded by Tiangong-2 "space laboratory", which is also at end of life (operational but no further missions pla…

If it crashes to earth, wont it release large amount of debris in the atmosphere?

We crash satellites and spacecraft all the time. Most burns up during re-entry, the rest...well that's why they aim for oceans usually.

Re: Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months

#22

Post by tehbeard »

GuiA wrote: post #6
KGIII wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically possible, highly technical. Also, really expensive and it might make some people mad. Are there actual space junk claiming rules, like that of sea wrecks? I could see someone just going up and stealing/taking a classified satellite before it de-orbited.

There’s a great premise for a sci-fi novel - an earth where machinery falls from the sky on a perpetual basis, due to it being more advantageous to send new objects rather than repair/upgrade the existing ones. Groups of scavengers track these impacts to salvage pieces and build their own machinery.

Defiance had advanced tech/debris falling from the orbiting wrecks of alien ships.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defiance_(TV_series)

Re: Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months

#23

Post by kabdib »

bjourne wrote: post #16
jpatokal wrote: post #13

Missing context: this is working as intended. Tiangong-1 was China's first space station demonstrator ("target vehicle", in official parlance) and barely larger than the Shenzhou spacecraft used to fly there, itself essentially a modernized copy of the 1960s-vintage Soviet Soyuz craft. It has already been succeeded by Tiangong-2 "space laboratory", which is also at end of life (operational but no further missions pla…

If it crashes to earth, wont it release large amount of debris in the atmosphere?

Every day, an estimated hundred tons of debris (mostly meteoric dust) hits the earth's atmosphere. A satellite is not a big deal; it burns up, possibly with small chunks hitting the surface.

Even if you were directly on the ground track for this thing, you wouldn't notice anything aside from the reentry fireball.

Re: Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months

#24

Post by [deleted] »

FussyZeus wrote: post #21
bjourne wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it crashes to earth, wont it release large amount of debris in the atmosphere?

We crash satellites and spacecraft all the time. Most burns up during re-entry, the rest...well that's why they aim for oceans usually.

[deleted]

Re: Tiangong-1: Chinese space station will crash to Earth within months

#25

Post by bjourne »

FooBarWidget wrote: post #17
bjourne wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it crashes to earth, wont it release large amount of debris in the atmosphere?

90% of the debris burns up in the atmosphere. The remaining 10% -- who knows where they end up, but it is said that it's unlikely that the debris hit anything important. This isn't the first time something like this happened. When NASA's SkyLab fell to earth in 1979, an Australian town fined them $400 -- for littering. https://science.slashdot.org/story/09/07/14/1556228/nasas-sk...

I was thinking about space debris: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris
Post reply on HN