China's Tiangong-1 space station could fall to Earth on Easter weekend

China's decommissioned Tiangong-1 space station is heading back to Earth.

Hour by hour, Tiangong-1 -- whose name translates to "Heavenly Palace" -- gets closer and closer to re-entering Earth's atmosphere, and mostly burning up in the process.

Trackers have been following the space station's descent over the course of a number of weeks, gathering radar images and coming up with estimates for when it'll come down.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is now predicting that the space station will fall to Earth sometime over Easter weekend, between March 31 and April 2.

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As the days have passed, the ESA has been coming out with new date ranges for the descent. The most recent range marks the most precise prediction for re-entry so far.

That said, we still don't know where Tiangong-1 will end up coming down.

The space station -- which launched to orbit in 2011 -- will circle the Earth dozens of times over the course of the weekend, before the station is expected to re-enter. Because of that, it's nearly impossible to pinpoint where the station will come down.

However, this uncertainty shouldn't be cause for concern.

First of all, the space station should mostly burn up harmlessly in Earth's atmosphere, but even if parts of the station do make it all the way to the planet's surface, the likelihood that they would land in a populated area is exceedingly small.

According to astronomer Jonathan McDowell, trackers won't be able to rule out Tiangong-1 landing in certain areas until the window is down to around 12 hours.

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It's kind of a funny thing that this particular bit of space junk falling to Earth has captured the imagination of people around the world.

Bits of junk like Tiangong-1 do fall to Earth on a pretty regular basis.

"A similar size object reentered over Peru in January (the Zenit rocket stage from the Angosat-1 launch) and a few pressurized tank pieces were found on the ground, but pretty much no-one paid attention," McDowell said via email earlier this month.

Tiangong-1 was visited by taikonauts -- Chinese astronauts -- twice over the course of its life. The station was replaced with the Tiangong-2 station in 2016.

Both stations are precursors to the larger space station China is expected to build sometime in the coming decade.