Point Nemo, Earth’s watery graveyard for spacecraft

In this undated photo, researchers test China's first space station module, Tiangong 1, at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China's Gansu Province prior to its launch on Sept. 29, 2011. | COLOR CHINA PHOTO / VIA AP

PARIS – One place China’s Earth-bound and out-of-control space lab, Tiangong 1, will probably not hit is the forlorn spot in the southern Pacific Ocean where it was supposed to crash.

China said Sunday that the Tiangong 1 will re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere at some point on Monday. South Korea expected it to re-enter sometime between 7:26 a.m. and 3:26 p.m.

The watery graveyard for titanium fuel tanks and other high-tech space debris, officially called an “oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” is better known to space junkies as Point Nemo, in honor of Jules Verne’s fictional submarine captain.

Point Nemo is farther from land than any other dot on the globe: 2,688 kilometers (1,450 miles) from Pitcairn Island 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.”

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 tons.

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“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-ton ISS also has a rendezvous with destiny at Point Nemo, in 2024.

In the 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 aluminum in the manufacture of fuel tanks.

China hoisted Tiangong 1, its first manned space lab, into space in 2011. It was slated for a controlled re-entry, but ground engineers lost control in March 2016 of the 8-ton craft in March 2016, which is when it began its descent toward a fiery end.

The chances of anyone getting hit by debris from Tiangong-1 are vanishingly small, less than 1 in 12 trillion, according to the ESA.

“Nemo,” by the way, means “no one” in Latin.

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source:https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2018/04/01/asia-pacific/science-health-asia-pacific/point-nemo-earths-watery-graveyard-spacecraft/#.WsDpK9RubIU