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maltatoday WEDNESDAY 28 MARCH 2018 14 News Maltese scientists tracking China's space station fiery re-entry to Earth The radio telescope in Bologna, which the Maltese team from the Institute of Space Sciences and Astron- omy (ISSA) is using to track China's first prototype space station, Tiangong-1, which is predicted to crash to Earth in the coming days Photo: jb.man.ac.uk MALTESE scientists have joined a team of international space experts to track Chi- na's abandoned space station, which is expected to make a fiery re-entry and crash back to Earth over Easter weekend. Using sophisticated tech- nology funded by the Italian Space Agency, the Maltese team from the Institute of Space Sciences and Astrono- my (ISSA) is monitoring Chi- na's first prototype space sta- tion, Tiangong-1, to predict where the pieces might fall and sound the alarm if neces- sary. "The 8,000kg space station, which has been in orbit for six years and been decom- missioned in 2016, is now abandoned and out of control. So just imagine, it's like hav- ing the equivalent of a large truck hurt-ling towards the earth from approximately 2,000km," ISSA director Kris- tian Zarb Adami said. But according to the Euro- pean Space Agency and space debris experts the chances of being personally hit by a piece of space metal are practically zero, especially if you live in Malta. "The friction caused by the Earth's atmosphere on its re- entry will mean that the sat- ellite will get destroyed, but there is a good chance that some parts will survive re-en- try and fall towards the earth. But luckily, most of the Earth is made up of water and it is likely that the Tiangong-1 will end up in a safe unpopulated zone like the Pacific," Prof Zarb Adami added. There are approximately 20,000 objects orbiting our Earth that have to be con- stantly tracked by the likes of ESA and NASA to make sure valuable space assets are safe from collisions with leftover space debris objects. The team of scientists at ISSA, led locally by Prof Kris- tian Zarb Adami, have devel- oped a new system that allows not only the detection of such space debris, but also enables scientists to predict where it will land. Alessio Magro, together with Denis Cutajar and Josef Borg, has devised an ingen- ious way of using a bi-static radar system based in Sar- dinia and Bologna to measure radar echoes from the falling objects. It is due to the Mal- tese scientists' efforts that for the first time a multi-pixel system has been installed on the Bologna radio telescope to watch the debris fall towards the earth. However, even with this new sophisticated technology, it remains difficult to estimate the debris' final landing place with a high degree of accu- racy, so the exact moment of the Tiangong-1's descent will only be determined just a few hours before. "This is because the event depends on a number of fac- tors including the variation in density of the atmosphere, the orientation of the spacecraft and the uncertainties in its exact location and velocity," Prof Zarb Adami said. To reduce this uncertainty, the prediction of the space sta- tion's decaying orbit is being monitored and updated with each pass of the Tiangong-1 over Bologna. The informa- tion is then combined with that collected by other teams from NASA and ESA to seek confirmation of the debris' size and orbit to predict where the debris will come to land. The latest predictions are that the Tiangong-1 will hur- tle towards Earth between Friday and Easter Monday and the impact zone could be anywhere between 43ºN and 43ºS.