China's Space Lab Will Soon Crash To Earth. Scientists Think They Know Where - Sort Of.

China's 9.5 ton space station, Tiangong-1, will come falling from space soon, and it's predicted to head in that general direction.

For the uninitiated, Tiangong-1 launched in 2011 as China's first space laboratory, a prototype for what the country hoped would eventually be a permanent space station. For about five years, it did just that, orbiting the Earth and acting as a base for three missions (two manned, one unmanned) for the Chinese National Space Administration.

In September 2016, however, Chinese officials announced that they had lost control of the station, meaning Tiangong-1 (literally "heavenly palace") would eventually defy its name and come hurtling back to Earth.

Exactly when or where it would do so was a mystery.At first, Chinese scientists ventured that the "uncontrolled reentry" would take place sometime in the latter half of 2017. That window was later pushed back to sometime between October 2017 and April 2018.

In January, the California-based nonprofit Aerospace Corp. predicted that Tiangong-1 would reenter in mid-March, give or take two weeks.

This week, the European Space Agency gave a more specific time frame - between March 29 and April 9 - and narrowed the reentry locations to "anywhere between 43 degrees North and 43 degrees South (e.g. Spain, France, Portugal, Greece, etc.)."

It is worth noting that the new predictions come with enough caveats (see: "etc.") to make a cable appointment seem exacting. The current estimated window is "highly variable," the European Space Agency cautioned. Areas outside the given latitudes could be excluded - but the forecast is still being updated weekly, it added.