In the coming days, the world is waiting for the retired Chinese space station Tiangong-1 to enter the earth's atmosphere. Most of the apparatus should burn out. Now in ESA is a company to monitor the return of the structure.
The 13 space agencies of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee use this event to conduct an annual re-testing campaign, in which participants combine their forecasts and tracking data sets. The goal is to check the level of event analysis, and improve the accuracy of forecasting.
These radar images (the composition of two photographs is shown at the top) were received last week by the Radar tracking and visualization system - one of the most powerful in the world. The spacecraft is pulled out at a length of 12 m, the diameter is 3.3 m, and the mass is 8506 kg. He has not been visited since 2013, and since 2016 they have lost all contact.
Now the construction is at an altitude of 200 km (in January - 300 km). The predicted decay time is morning of March 31 or April 2. Due to serious differences in the dynamics of the atmosphere and the process of decay, time and geographical point of incidence can be predicted with great uncertainty. However, in the history of space flights the victims of the fall of orbital debris have not yet been fixed.
