Point Nemo, Earth's watery graveyard for spacecraft

Chinese space scientists were not in control of their Tiangong-1 orbiting laboratory when it hurtled back to Earth and into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean on Monday. But if they had been, that's where they would have tried to make it land.

By sheer fluke, anything that didn't burn up in the atmosphere is expected to have plopped down somewhere near the forlorn spot that is amongst the most remote places on the planet.

Officially called an "oceanic pole of inaccessibility," this watery graveyard for titanium fuel tanks and other high-tech space debris is better known to space junkies as Point Nemo, in honour of Jules Verne's fictional submarine captain.

"Nemo" is also Latin for "no one".

Point Nemo is further from land than any other dot on the globe: 2,688 kilometres (about 1,450 miles) from the Pitcairn Islands to the north, one of the Easter Islands to the northwest, and Maher Island -- part of Antarctica -- to the South.

"Its most attractive feature for controlled re-entries is that nobody is living there," said Stijn Lemmens, a space debris expert at the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany.

"Coincidentally, it is also biologically not very diverse. So it gets used as a dumping ground -- 'space graveyard' would be a more polite term -- mainly for cargo spacecraft," he told AFP.

Some 250 to 300 spacecraft -- which have mostly burned up as they carved a path through Earth's atmosphere -- have been laid to rest there, he said.

By far the largest object descending from the heavens to splash down at Point Nemo, in 2001, was Russia's MIR space lab, which weighed 120 tonnes.

"It is routinely used nowadays by the (Russian) Progress capsules, which go back-and-forth to the International Space Station (ISS)," said Lemmens.

The massive, 420-tonne ISS also has a rendezvous with destiny at Point Nemo, in 2024.

In future, most spacecraft will be "designed for demise" with materials that melt at lower temperatures, making them far less likely to survive re-entry and hit Earth's surface.

Both NASA and the ESA, for example, are switching from titanium to aluminium in the manufacture of fuel tanks.

China hoisted Tiangong-1, it's first manned space lab, into space in 2011. It was slated for a controlled re-entry but ground engineers lost control of the eight-tonne craft in March 2016, which is when it began its descent towards a fiery end.

The lab's demise has been the subject of much chatter among space watchers for months, with the uncertainty of its atmospheric re-entry attracting much attention over recent days.

Scientists had only been able to give the most general of forecasts for exactly when and where the lab would plunge back to Earth, offering a huge band of the planet that included almost all of South America, Africa and Asia, as well as the southern portions of the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans.

Despite the vagueness of their forecasts, scientists said they could be relatively sure that no one was going to be hurt by the remnants of the lab, and said it would most likely land in the ocean.

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Paris (ESA) Jan 18, 2018
Space debris is a hazard to our satellites and spacecraft as well as a contributor to near-Earth space pollution. To help raise awareness of this issue, ESA's Education Office is organising the first ESA Academy Space Debris Training Course. The Space Debris Training Course will be hosted at the ESA Academy's Training and Learning Centre in ESEC, Redu, Belgium, from 16 to 20 April 2018. University students will be provided with an introduction to the concept of space debris, why it is necessary to ... read more