With the imminent fall of this space station about to happen in just a few days, people have started to wonder what are the chances of them getting hit by pieces of it. The short answer to this question is that no, it is highly unlikely that you will get hit by it. The more elaborated answer takes into account more factors.
What do the experts have to say about this?
Marco Langbroek is known as a space consultant for the Space Security Center of the Royal Dutch Air Force and Leiden Observatory. His main job is to track the trajectories of satellites, publishing his findings on the SatTrackCam blog. Since last March he has been following Tiangong-1 very closely.
He stated that there are a number of reasons why the risk level is very low. For starters, the space station is about the size of a school bus and when it will get into our atmosphere it would start to disintegrate at a very fast pace. The remaining bits, due to the calculated trajectory, will probably fall into the ocean. The changes of one of these space debris parts falling in a city are about 1 In 1 trillion so everyone should rest assured. We are not facing any form of danger.
The European Space Agency calculated the odds of this event happening to be about one in 300 trillion. Yes, in the past there have been cases where people were hit by small pieces of debris coming from space but they did not suffer any injuries from them.
The only danger that people may find their selves in is if they try to analyze the debris. Scientists have said that it may contain hydrazine, a type or corrosive rocket fuel, so people are strongly encouraged not to touch or get too close to this type of debris if they encounter it.
