Plummeting Chinese Space Station Spares NYC

NEW YORK, NY – Mark yourself safe. A Chinese Space Station roughly the size of a school bus re-entered Earth's atmosphere this weekend, crashing down into a remote part of the southern Pacific Ocean.

Though New York City – along with a huge swath of the USA – had been considered in a high risk area to be affected by the falling space hardware, it came down nowhere near land. In fact, it's likely no one even saw the fiery re-entry.

Tiangong 1, which translates to “Heavenly Palace,” entered earth's atmosphere around 5:16 p.m. Pacific Time on Sunday, the Joint Force Space Component Command said in a release.

The agency used Space Surveillance Network sensors and the network's orbital analysis system to confirm the station's re-entry, officials said.

The odds that someone could've been hit by space junk were extraordinarily small — less than 1 in 1 trillion, the organization Aerospace Corp. estimated. The European Space Agency said the odds were more like 1 in 300 trillion.

The space lab was made up of an experimental module where astronauts would live as well as a resource module that contained solar energy and propulsion systems, space.com reported.

China's first space station was launched in September 2011. Initially, the disposal plan was to have a controlled reentry, with people on the ground controlling the craft's engines to significantly slow its descent.

But in March 2016, the station stopped functioning — teams on the ground could no longer control it. So it made a much-anticipated "uncontrolled reentry," the ESA said, and in doing-so, drummed up much fanfare and conjured images of other famous space junk falls, including Skylab and the Delta II rocket.

Interestingly, Chinese space officials insist that the Tiangong re-entry was "controlled."

"They're very, very unhappy when you use this term 'uncontrolled,'" Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation who's an expert on China's space program told Space.com.

Chinese officials defended their stance saying they knew where their station was and could provide location updates whenever they wanted.

But other nations define a "controlled" re-entry much differently. Most important, that people have some control over guiding the craft's descent.

Cheng told the news outlet China should be strongly encouraged to accept the latter definition and he even called for the country to face consequences.

This story was reported by Dan Hampton/Patch

Photo credit: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images