‘Point Nemo’ isn’t a tangible point; it is basically a spot in the South Pacific Ocean that appears to be 2,688 km (or 1,450 nm) north of Pitcairn Island.
Do you know where is the graveyard of Spacecraft’s sent to space, on earth? Yes, there is such place on earth, often recalled as an “oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” which is a watery graveyard for titanium fuel tanks and other high-tech space debris better known as ‘Point Nemo’. This place is the farthest from the ground, and it is not easy to reach there. It derives its name ‘Nemo’ from Captain Nemo, a fictional character in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea.
Point Nemo isn’t a tangible point; it is basically a spot in the South Pacific Ocean that appears to be 2,688 km (or 1,450 nm) north of Pitcairn Island. On the globe, it is south from Maher Island (Antarctica). It was believed that China’s uncontrolled space station Tiangong-1 (Heavenly Palace), which has been, will also fall here on Sunday. Although it is unlikely to crash here.
According to Stijn Lemmens, a space debris expert at the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany, “ Its most attractive feature for controlled re-entries is that nobody is living there”.
Speaking to an agency he said, “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 further asserted, “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”.
By far the biggest object that collided Point Nemo, in 2001, was MIR Space Lab in Russia. It weighed 120 tonnes.
Lemmens further added that “It is routinely used nowadays by the (Russian) Progress capsules, which go back-and-forth to the International Space Station (ISS).” Interestingly, the last floor of the Giant 420-ton ISS will also be Point Nemo in 2024.
Experts say, that in the future most of the spacecraft’s will be designed with such substances that will completely melt on re-entry. In this scenario, the possibility of collision with the surface of their land will almost end.
Both NASA and ESA are working in this direction to shift from titanium to aluminium for constructing fuel tanks.
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