Out-of-control space station hurtling to Earth but scientists don't know when or where it will fall

Western experts don't even know what's on board the plunging satellite

An out-of-control space station is headed down to Earth in the coming weeks – but scientists don't know where or exactly when it will arrive.

The Tiangong-1 satellite – a space station operated by the Chinese space agency – has been tumbling down to Earth for months. Experts warn that its engineers appear to have lost control of it, but Chinese authorities have said very little about what is happening to the object.

Outside space experts have said that the space station is clearly falling down to Earth and that it appears engineers won't be able to manage that process.

The space station is set to fall down to Earth sometime between 29 March and 9 April, according to scientists the European Space Agency who warn that projection is "highly variable". But it's not possible to know where or when exactly it will fall.

They said they expect the object to fall 43-degrees north and 43-degrees south. In western Europe, that would put it somewhere around Spain, France or Portugal – but the object could fall anywhere around the globe, meaning that it could also drop into the Pacific or Atlantic Oceans.

Estimating when or where the object will fall is so difficult because Chinese authorities have revealed very little about its fall. It's also difficult to know how it will survive its descent, and what will happen when it's over, since western experts don't even know what the space station is made out of or what it is carrying.

Experts at the US-funded Aerospace Corporation warned last week that some debris could survive the descent to the Earth and land on the ground. "“If this should happen, any surviving debris would fall within a region that is a few hundred kilometres in size,” they wrote.

But they said the chance it would hit anyone was very unlikely indeed. "When considering the worst-case location, the probability that a specific person will be struck by Tiangong-1 debris is about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot," they wrote.

However, the mystery over what is inside the space station means that it's not possible to know what kind of danger it would pose once it had landed on the ground. "For your safety, do not touch any debris you may find on the ground nor inhale vapours it may emit," experts wrote.