Welcome to lonely Point Nemo, Earth's dumping ground for derelict space junk

Point Nemo, the loneliest and most remote expanse of ocean on Earth, is where spacecraft go when they die.

This spread of water, 34 times larger than France, has been used as a dumping ground for space vehicles since 1971. An estimated 263 decommissioned spacecraft, including the Russian space station Mir, have been deliberately brought down and sunk here.

In 2031, the International Space Station, in orbit since 1998, will join them. It will rest about 13,000 feet down, deeper than the wreck of Titanic.

The South Pacific region, the farthest point in the ocean from any land, is named after Captain Nemo, the captain of the submarine Nautilus from the 1870 Jules Verne story “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.” Nemo is Latin for “no one” or “nobody.”

Where is Point Nemo?

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Point Nemo, also called the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility, is at coordinates 48°52.6′S 123°23.6′W, according to the National Ocean Service. It's about 1,670 miles from the nearest land, including:

• Ducie Island, part of the Pitcairn Islands, to the north.
• Motu Nui, one of the Easter Islands, to the northeast.
• Maher Island, part of Antarctica, to the south.

It would be difficult to find a more isolated place than Point Nemo, The Atlantic magazine says. It has no national jurisdiction, commercial shipping vessels don't sail through it, and no nation has navy ships there.

It's even considered closer to space than to any Earth land mass. The Kármán line, known as the boundary of space, is 62 miles above Earth. Astronauts aboard the ISS in equatorial low-Earth orbit pass within 200 to 250 miles of Point Nemo.

Point Nemo is known as a marine desert, thanks to the South Pacific Gyre, a large system of ocean currents. That system prevents most land-based marine nutrients from entering the area.

Why will the ISS be sent to Point Nemo?

At the end of its working life, the International Space Station will be brought back to Earth – "deorbited," as NASA says – in a controlled maneuver to keep it away from populated areas. NASA says it will use a SpaceX Deorbit Vehicle to bring down the station.

What spacecraft are buried beneath Point Nemo?

Besides Skylab and Mir, other spacecraft at the bottom of Point Nemo include, according to the BBC:

• Six Salyut space stations.
• 140 Russian resupply rockets.
• Six Japanese cargo transfer rockets.
• Five European Space Agency cargo transfer rockets.

Parts of the Skylab space station crashed into Australia and the Indian Ocean during its reentry in 1979. Other parts are believed to be beneath Point Nemo.

SOURCE Paste BN Network reporting and research; Reuters; NASA; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration