China’s first prototype space station is to crash to Earth over Easter scientists expect, amid rumours that the Chinese space agency has lost control of the craft. Known as Tiangong-1 (meaning “heavenly palace” in Chinese) the craft is expected to drop out of orbit over the next week and plummet through Earth’s atmosphere at a speed of seven kilometres per second. Some scientists fear that debris could survive the atmosphere and land anywhere 43 degrees either side of the equator, though most predict the bus-sized spacecraft is most likely to burn up upon re-entry. Reseachers have warned that a number of the spacecraft’s parts – including its dense rocket engines – would be unlikely to burn up, leaving chunks of the craft to crash towards the planet’s surface.
