BEIJING – A defunct Chinese space lab broke apart as it hurtled throughEarth’s atmosphere Monday and plunged towards a watery grave in the SouthPacific, Chinese officials said.

The Tiangong-1 “mostly” burnt up above the vast ocean’s central region at8:15 am (0015 GMT), China’s Manned Space Engineering Office said.

There was no immediate confirmation of the final resting place of anyremaining debris, although the South Pacific is largely empty. Spaceofficials had promised the atmospheric disintegration would offer a”splendid” show akin to a meteor shower.

But the remote location likely deprived stargazers of a spectacle offireballs falling from the sky.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center forAstrophysics, said the module zoomed over Pyongyang and the Japanese cityof Kyoto during daylight hours, reducing the odds of seeing it before ithit the Pacific.

“It would have been fun for people to see it, but there will be otherreentries,” McDowell told AFP. “The good thing is that it doesn’t cause anydamage when it comes down and that’s what we like.”

Space officials had warned that knowing the exact location of the re-entrywould not be possible until shortly before it happened.

The difficulties seemed to wrong-foot Chinese space scientists — justmoments before announcing the craft would come down over the Pacific, theysaid it would make its re-entry over Sao Paulo, and head towards theAtlantic Ocean.

The US military’s network of radars and sensors also confirmed that theTiangong-1 had re-entered over the Pacific, but a minute later than theChinese estimate, according to a statement by the Joint Force SpaceComponent Command (JFSCC).

The JFSCC said it confirmed the re-entry in coordination with Australia,Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and South Korea.

*Wrong guess*

McDowell said China’s space agency’s initial estimate for re-entry was offbecause it “guessed wrong” about the time that the space lab would comedown from its orbital path.

“That’s all that happened,” he said, as models used by experts to estimatea re-entry point pick the middle time in a return window.

The European Space Agency had indicated earlier that the Tiangong-1 waslikely to break up over water, which covers most of the planet’s surface.

It described the probability of someone being hit by a piece of debris fromTiangong-1 as “10 million times smaller than the yearly chance of being hitby lightning”.

Tiangong-1 — or “Heavenly Palace” — was placed in orbit in September2011, an important step in China’s efforts towards building its own spacestation.

The module — which was used to practise complicated manual and automaticdocking techniques — was originally intended to be used for just twoyears, but ended up serving considerably longer.

During its brief lifespan, it hosted Chinese astronauts on severaloccasions as they performed experiments and even taught a class that wasbroadcast into schools across the country.

*Out of control?*

Tiangong-1 had been slated for a controlled re-entry, but ceasedfunctioning in March 2016. Space enthusiasts have been bracing for itsreturn ever since.

The ESA has said that ground controllers were no longer able to commandTiangong-1 to fire its on-board engines, which could have been used todetermine where it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere.

In contrast, Russia brought down its massive Mir space station through acontrolled re-entry over the Pacific Ocean in 2001. A Chinese spaceflightengineer denied earlier this year that the lab was out of control.

Chinese media have downplayed comments by the ESA and others that thecountry’s engineers have lost control of the lab, with reports saying thatthe idea it is “out of control” is an invention of foreign media.

Beijing began its manned spaceflight programme in 1990 after buying Russiantechnology that enabled it to become the third country with the ability tolaunch humans into space, following the former Soviet Union and the UnitedStates.

China sent another space lab, Tiangong-2, into orbit in September 2016 as astepping stone to its goal of having a crewed space station by 2022.

It also plans to send a manned mission to the moon in the future. – APP/AFP