With increasing regularity, Earth’s oceans are the drop zones for incoming leftovers from space.
For decades, Russian Progress resupply spacecraft loaded with tons of waste from the International Space Station (ISS) have been intentionally steered to reentries over the Pacific Ocean’s “spacecraft cemetery.” Similarly, Northop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo vehicles are filled with rubbish from the space station crew and ultimately ditched over the South Pacific.
In the past, other discarded orbiting facilities — such as Russia’s Mir space station and China’s Tiangong-1 prototype outpost — ended their lives over ocean waters. Then there’s the saga of America’s Skylab experimental station, which fell to Earth in 1979, with odds and ends scattering across the southern Australian coast.
And a huge piece of falling space junk will come back to Earth in the not-too-distant future — the nearly 500-ton ISS. The plan is to bring the ISS down in a controlled fashion over the South Pacific Oceanic Uninhabited Area, a region around Point Nemo formally known as “the oceanic pole of inaccessibility.”
This remote sea setting is about 1,450 nautical miles (2,685 kilometers) from the nearest piece of dry land. The closest terra firm is Ducie Island, part of the Pitcairn Islands, to the north; Motu Nui, one of the Easter Islands, to the northeast; and Maher Island, part of Antarctica, to the south.
Is dumping space junk over Point Nemo a good idea? Or can we do better?
Source
