But if the timings are correct, any wreckage would probably have dived into the Indian Ocean - although no eyewitness reports have yet come in.

If anything did manage to make landfall, the likely areas to be affected would have been Myanmar and China.

What made the redundant German craft's return interesting was that much more debris was expected to survive all the way to the Earth's surface.

Experts had calculated that perhaps as much as 1.6 tonnes of wreckage - more than half the spacecraft's launch mass - could have riden out the destructive forces of re-entry and hit the planet.

[link to www.bbc.co.uk]

Peace