Illinois Is In High-Risk Area For Falling Space Station
(Patch.com) -- It might sound like a bad joke, but a space station the size of a bus is literally falling out of the sky and parts of it are expected to hit Earth on April Fools' Day, give or take a few days. A map from Aerospace predicts the most likely spots for China's Tiangong-1 space lab to land include most of Illinois and Indiana, nearly all of Iowa and the southern tip of Wisconsin, and it's expected to fall to earth between March 30 and April 6, depending on who you ask. And while the odds that someone is hit by space debris in Illinois are pretty low, it has happened at least one other time in the U.S.
Tiangong-1, China's first space station and an experimental space laboratory, was launched in September 2011. Initially, the disposal plan was to have a controlled reentry for the station. People on the ground would control the craft's engines and significantly slow its descent.