Explained: Point Nemo on Earth, the graveyard for satellites and spaceships

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has already told the world that the International Space Station (ISS), the largest space station ever built, will plunge into the Pacific Ocean in early 2031.

ISS is a large space station which has been assembled and maintained in low Earth orbit. It is a collaboration of five space agencies: NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, CSA, and their contractors. But where exactly will it crash?

What is Point Nemo?

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Ever wondered what the crashing of satellites on Earth looks like? What will happen if the satellites or other space junk fall on civilisation? It would be deadly, hence, the scientists finalised a place that would safely serve the purpose of a space cemetery.

The place is known as Point Nemo.

The US-based space agency has already said that the ISS would crash into Point Nemo, which is the graveyard for satellites and spaceships. It is formally known as the South Pacific Ocean(ic) Uninhabited Area.

It is located in the southern Pacific Ocean east of New Zealand. All those spacecraft that have reached the end of their life or purpose are routinely crashed.

Point Nemo is the oceanic pole of inaccessibility. It is so far away from any land on Earth that the closest people to it are often on board the ISS. It is approximately 2,688 kilometres from the nearest shore.

The closest land in one direction,Ducie Island, an atoll in the Pitcairn Islands, is officially the closest place to it. Even that particular landmass is uninhabited, so a person would have to travel a little further to find any people in case one would head north.

If one would head south, the person will arrive at Maher Island in Antarctica, or head northeast to Motu Nui Island, another deserted island near Easter Island.

People often assume that Point Nemo's name is based on the film Finding Nemo, but that's not the case. It has been named after the famous submarine sailor from Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea - Captain Nemo. The name Nemo is derived from a Latin term that means 'no man'.

The Hrvoje Lukatela, a Croatian survey engineer, named the region in 1992. He also recalculated the exact coordinates using Google Maps data to compare them to his original findings. The exact coordinates of this remote oceanic location are said to be at 48°52.6'S 123°23.6'W.

The spacecraft cemetery

Well, it's understandable why Point Nemo is the most suitable place to crash a satellite in a controlled manner because plunging satellites from a great height won't potentially hurt anyone.

In a report published in 2018, Stijn Lemmens, who is a space debris expert at the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, said: "Its most attractive feature for controlled re-entries is that nobody is living there."

"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.

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

It also means that there might even be some interesting space junk beneath the ocean, but can we visit and see it? The answer is no, because the sea is quite deep down there, around 13,000 feet or two and a half miles.

Are there any environmental implications?

Concerns have been raised about the environmental impact posed by the spaceship cemetery. Experts have often said that it might put marine species in the South Pacific Ocean Uninhabited Region in danger.

However, scientists are trying to tackle the issue by opting for environmentally friendly components while designing the spacecraft.

In recent years, scientists have said that most spacecraft in future will be designed for demise using materials that melt at lower temperatures, making them significantly less likely to survive re-entry and land on Earth's surface.

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For example, NASA and the ESA are moving from titanium to aluminium fuel tanks. But still, there are chances that something might go wrong.

Something similar happened with China's Tiangong-1. It was China's first manned prototype space lab and started orbiting Earth in2011. It was officially declared defunct inMarch 2016 after theground engineers lost communications. Afew months later some satellite trackers said that the Chinese space agency was no longer in control of the space lab.

It then started its descent towards a fiery end and reentered the Earth's atmosphere at approximately 00:16 UTC on April 2, 2018, over the South Pacific Ocean at 24.5°S 151.1°W.

According to Chinese state news agency Xinhua, the station mostly burnt up upon re-entry. There are no reports of anyone being hurt, but a fisherman from the nearby island of Maupiti is believed to have witnessed the event.

(With inputs from agencies)