Maryland Within High-Risk Area For Falling Space Station Debris

While it sounds like a bad April Fools' Day prank this is happening: A space station the size of a bus is falling out of the sky and parts of it that don't burn up in re-entry are expected to hit Earth on Sunday, April 1, 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 Maryland and northern Virginia, nearly all of Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and it's expected to fall to earth between March 30 and April 6, depending on which scientist you ask. And while the odds that someone is hit by space debris in Maryland 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 re-entry for the station. People on the ground would control the craft's engines and significantly slow its descent.

"Firing the engines would have been done at a specific moment so that it would reenter the atmosphere and substantially burn up over a large, unpopulated region of the South Pacific ocean," the European Space Agency said in a blog post. "Any surviving pieces would fall into the ocean, far from any populated areas."

But that's not what's going to happen this weekend. (For more news like this, find your local Patch here. If you have an iPhone, click here to get the free Patch iPhone app; download the free Patch Android app here.)

In March 2016, the space station stopped functioning, so teams on the ground are no longer in control of it.
"It is, therefore, expected to make an 'uncontrolled reentry,'" the ESA says.

And some pieces will probably make it through that fiery re-entry, though no one knows exactly where they'll end up.

The organization Aerospace Corp. has produced a map of the most likely places the debris could land. Its analysis indicates the station will make reentry somewhere between 43 degrees North and 43 degrees South latitudes, which includes northern California and parts of Illinois, as well as parts of southern Europe, China and Japan.

Other states in the "high risk" areas include most of Maryland and parts of Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Boston, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire.

It won't be possible to give a more exact location until hours before re-entry, but the odds you get hit by a piece of the space station are extraordinarily low: about 1 million times smaller than winning a Powerball jackpot — and that's if you live in one of the high-risk areas, Aerospace Corp. estimated.

The organization says the odds are less than 1 in 1 trillion. And the ESA estimates it's even smaller: 1 in 300 trillion.

Andrew Abraham, a senior member of the technical staff at Aerospace Corp., tells NBC News the debris is more likely to fall into the ocean or a piece of uninhabited land.

But the odds are just that — low. Lottie Williams knows this perhaps better than anyone.

Williams is the only person known to be hit by falling space junk. In 1997, she was walking through a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when she and her friends saw a fireball in the sky. Less than half an hour later, she felt a strange tap on her shoulder. She also heard something else hit the ground. It was a piece of the Delta II rocket.

"The weight was comparable to an empty soda can," she told Fox News. "It looked like a piece of fabric except when you tap it, it sounded metallic."

Two decades earlier, in July 1979, Americans watched the sky in awe as Skylab, America's first manned space station, plunged to the Earth. While some feared being hit by space junk, others celebrated and turned it into a commercial opportunity. There were several Skylab parties and one hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, even designated itself an official crash zone, featuring a painted target.

Although Tiangong-1 will likely draw much less fanfare, people might see some streaks across the sky at the time of reentry depending on how close they are to the path of the debris.

If some of the Tiangong-1 should fall onto your property, it could actually be hazardous to your health. You should contact local authorities if you see any debris.

You can watch the satellite's exact location here.

Patch reporter Dan Hampton contributed to this report.

Photo credit: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images