One place China’s Earth-bound and out-of-control space lab, Tiangong-1, will probably not hit today is the forlorn spot in the southern Pacific Ocean where it was supposed to crash.
Officially called an “oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” the watery graveyard for titanium fuel tanks and other high-tech space debris is better known to space junkies as Point Nemo, in honor of Jules Verne’s fictional submarine captain.
Point Nemo is further from land than any other spot on the globe: 2,688km from the Pitcairn Islands to the north, one of the Easter Islands to the northwest, and Maher Island — part of Antarctica — to the south.
Photo: AP
“Nemo” means “no one” in Latin.
“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 (ESA) 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 reporters.
About 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],” Lemmens said.
The massive, 420-tonne ISS also has a rendezvous with destiny at Point Nemo, in 2024.
Most spacecraft are “designed for demise” with materials that melt at lower temperatures, making them far less likely to survive re-entry and hit Earth’s surface.
NASA and the ESA, for example, are switching from titanium to aluminum in the manufacturing of fuel tanks.
China launched Tiangong-1, its first manned space lab, into space in 2011. It was slated for a controlled re-entry, but ground engineers in March 2016 lost control of the 8-tonne craft, which then began its descent toward a fiery end.
The chances of anyone getting hit by debris from Tiangong-1 are vanishingly small, less than one in 12 trillion, the ESA said.
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