Where is the spacecraft graveyard. South Pacific Spaceship Graveyard: coordinates

Spaceship Graveyard October 29th, 2017

The farthest point on Earth from land has many names, but most often it is called Point Nemo, or the oceanic pole of inaccessibility. It is located at 48°52.6 south latitude and 123°23.6 west longitude. The nearest island of land is located about 2250 kilometers from here. Due to its remoteness, this place is ideal for the disposal of spacecraft, and therefore space agencies often refer to it as the "spaceship graveyard".

This place is located in the Pacific Ocean and is the most distant point on our planet from any human civilization.

The wreckage of the station "Mir"

However, Bill Aylor, an aerospace engineer and re-entry specialist, has a different definition for this place:

"This is the best place on the planet to drop something from space without causing third-party damage."

To "bury" the next spacecraft in this cemetery, space agencies need some time to make the necessary calculations. As a rule, more compact satellites do not end their lives at point Nemo, because, NASA explains, “the heat created by atmospheric friction, to a greater extent, destroys a satellite falling at a speed of several thousand kilometers per hour even before it falls. TA-dah! It's like magic. As if there was no satellite!

Larger objects like Tiangong-1, China's first orbital space station, launched in September 2011 and weighing around 8.5 tons, are quite another matter. China lost control of the 12-meter orbital laboratory in March 2016. Forecasts are disappointing. The station should fall to Earth sometime in early 2018. Where exactly? So far no one knows. The same Aylor, who works for the nonprofit Aerospace Corporation, says his company likely won't make predictions until five days before the station is expected to collapse in Earth's atmosphere. When that happens, hundreds of kilograms of various metal parts like the station's titanium skin, fuel tanks, and more will continue to fall at over 300 kilometers per hour until they eventually hit the planet's surface.

Since China has lost control of the Tiangong-1 station, the country cannot confidently predict whether it will fall into Point Nemo.

Junkyard of spaceships

Interestingly, astronauts living aboard the International Space Station are, in fact, closest to this very point Nemo. The thing is that the ISS is circling over the Earth (and in particular over the place we are talking about) at an altitude of about 400 kilometers, while the piece of land closest to Point Nemo is much further away.

From 1971 to mid-2016, space agencies from around the world buried at least 260 spacecraft here, according to Popular Science. At the same time, as the Gizmodo portal notes, the number of disposed spacecraft has increased dramatically since 2015, when their total number was only 161 at that time.

Here, at a depth of more than three kilometers, the Soviet space station "Mir", more than 140 Russian cargo spacecraft, several trucks of the European Space Agency (for example, the first automatic cargo ship "Jules Verne" of the ATV series) and even one of the rockets SpaceX, according to reports from Smithsonian.com. True, the spacecraft here can hardly be called neatly stacked in one heap. Ailor notes that objects as large as the Tangun-1 station can break apart when they fall, covering an area of ​​​​1600 kilometers along and several dozen across. The very same territory of "alienation" of Nemo's point covers an area of ​​​​more than 17 million square kilometers, so finding a specific fallen spacecraft here is not so easy as it might seem at first glance.

The European Space Agency's Jules Verne cargo ship breaks apart on re-entry. September 29, 2008

Of course, not all spacecraft end up in this space technology graveyard, but the chances that a part of a collapsing spacecraft will fall on one of the people, regardless of where this spacecraft will fall to Earth, are very small, Aylor notes.

“Of course, nothing is impossible. However, since the beginning of the space age, the last incident that comes to mind occurred already in 1997. Then in Oklahoma, an unburned part of a rocket fell on a woman, ” Aylor explains.

The same unburned piece of rocket and the woman it fell on

A dead spacecraft can create a much greater danger in orbit.

The real threat of space debris

At the moment, about 4,000 artificial satellites are circling the Earth at various altitudes. And there should be more in the near future. In other words, orbit is still full of various spacecraft, and soon there will be no crowding at all.

In addition to satellites, there are thousands of uncontrolled rocket remains in orbit, as well as more than 12,000 other artificial objects larger than a human fist, according to statistics from the Space-Track.org website. And this is if you omit countless different screws, bolts, pieces of dried paint (from rocket skins) and many metal particles.

“Over time, countries began to realize that they were literally littering space and this posed a serious threat not only to their systems, but to everyone in general” Ailor adds.

The worst, according to experts from the same European Space Agency, can happen when two pieces of space debris collide with each other, especially when these objects are large.

Random collisions of the same satellites, although very rare, do occur. The last such incidents were in 1996, 2009 and two in 2013. As a result of such events, as well as as a result of the deliberate destruction of satellites, a huge amount of space debris appears, posing a threat to other working satellites and the danger of a chain effect.

"We have found that this debris can remain in orbit for hundreds of years," Aylor comments.

To prevent the emergence of new space debris, aging spacecraft must be deorbited over time. Many space agencies, as well as private space companies, are now considering building a dedicated scavenger spacecraft that could capture obsolete satellites and other spacecraft and send them straight to an underwater spacecraft graveyard on Earth.

However, the same Aylor, like some other experts, insists on the development of new technologies and methods with which it will be possible to capture, drag and remove old uncontrolled space debris that has accumulated in orbit and poses a real threat.

“I proposed something like XPRIZE and the Grand Challenge, where it would be possible to select the concepts of the three most suitable spacecraft and give grants for their development and subsequent use in cleaning up the planet’s orbit,” Ailor says.

Unfortunately, technical difficulties in the implementation of such plans are far from being in the first place among the problems when there is such a thing as bureaucracy.

“Technical difficulties are far from the main thing here. The main problem here is the idea of ​​private property. For example, no other nation has the right to touch the same American satellites. If something like this happens, it could be calculated as an act of military aggression.” Aylor explains.

According to Aylor, in the face of a common threat, the nations of the whole world should unite, because only in this way can such problems be effectively solved.

In the remote region of the Pacific Ocean southeast of New Zealand, the depth reaches 4000 meters. There are thousands of kilometers to the nearest land from here, there are not even small islands, ships rarely sail here.

In this desert region of the ocean, there is the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility or Point Nemo, named after the hero of a science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The coordinates of the point are 48⁰52′ south latitude and 123⁰23′ west longitude. The nearest land is Duci Atoll, located 2688 km to the north.

Somewhere here, under the thickness of the ocean waves, 145 Russian Progress, 4 Japanese HTV space trucks and 5 ATV automatic cargo vehicles of the European Space Agency found their last refuge. “Next to them” lie the remains of the Mir space station and 6 Salyuts.

The word "nearby" is not accidentally in quotation marks. None of the spaceships has survived in the form of more or less significant fragments. Contact with the atmosphere is detrimental to spacecraft unless they are equipped with effective thermal protection, as is the case with manned descent modules.

No one ever planned to return space trucks and orbital stations to Earth for reuse. Once in the dense layers of the atmosphere, such space objects are destroyed and burned.

As Holger Krag, one of the leaders of the European Space Agency, explained in 2013, under such conditions, even in the case of a controlled landing of an obsolete object, its fragments are scattered over a very large area.

The section of the ocean where the surviving fragments of spaceships are flooded stretches for 3,000 km from north to south and for 5,000 km from west to east.

The largest object of the cemetery is the 143-ton Mir station, the remains of which sank to the ocean floor in March 2001 after 15 years of orbital service. According to experts, six main fragments of Mir and many small fragments with a total weight of 20-25 tons reached the bottom.

"Mir" began to collapse at an altitude of 95 kilometers. Fragments of the station are scattered over a vast area about 3000 km long and about 100 km wide.

Despite the fact that the "cemetery" is located far from the busy sea routes, there may be ships and aircraft here. The authorities of Chile and New Zealand are responsible for navigation in the region. Therefore, in the event of planned flooding, spacecraft owners warn these countries several days in advance, and transmit to them data on the estimated time and place of the fall of debris. Having received a notification, the authorized services notify aircraft and sea vessels of the danger.

This report is available in high definition.

In the Pacific Ocean there is a unique natural formation - the Truk (or Chuuk) lagoon. About 10 million years ago there was a large island here, but over time it sank under water.

During the Second World War, the islands around the lagoon housed a large naval military base in Japan, as well as an airfield. In 1944, ships of the 4th Imperial Fleet and the command of the 6th Submarine Fleet were in the Truk Lagoon, but on February 17, 1944, the Americans launched the military operation Hillston, which resulted in the sinking of more than 30 large and many small Japanese ships.

We go down to the depths to look at the underwater graveyard of ships in the Pacific Ocean.

This is how our Blue Lagoon Resort, which is located on the island of Dublon, looked like. The houses we live in are very reminiscent of the standard houses from the first Far Cry. So it seems. that a dude in a red Hawaiian shirt is about to jump out from behind the palm trees and start to wet everyone here. And somewhere here, nearby, there should be a skeleton of a Japanese aircraft carrier, then the similarity will be complete:

Fefan Island. You can't confuse him with anyone:

Let's go to the dive site:

Remains of the ship. The wheelhouse and engine telegraph:

In the engine room:

Inscription on board:

Depth 36 meters. Anti-tank guns on the deck of the Nippo Maru, there are 3 of them:

Depth 37 meters. Light Japanese tank at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean:

Depth 25 meters. Cargo-passenger steamer Rio de Janeiro Maru. lies on the starboard side. This is the left screw:

Depth 12 meters. View from the pilot's seat of the Nakajima B6N "Jill" torpedo bomber of the Imperial Japanese Navy:

Depth 36 meters. Another plane "Jill":

Sunken Japanese ship Shinkoku Maru, On the navigation bridge:

An Isuzu truck in the hold of a Shinkoku Maru ship. Only the front half remained of the ship, the rear part collapsed from the explosion of an American bomb:

The cargo boom of the Shinkoku Maru ship is covered in soft corals:

The fuselage of the Claude fighter - the predecessor of the famous Zero in the hold of the sunken Japanese ship Fujikawa Maru:

Fujikawa Maru ship. The hallmark of Truk Lagoon is the spooky air compressor in the lathe shop:

This is the end of a week of diving in the Truk Lagoon. About 10 sunken ships and two planes were examined. This is the sunset of the last evening on Doublon Island, Truk Lagoon.

The volume of space debris in Earth orbit has reached a critical threshold, experts say. It is already becoming dangerous not only for orbiting spacecraft, but for all of us. More than 20,000 pieces of debris revolve in near-Earth space. NASA spoke about the need to launch a special cleaner into space.

Is it possible to carry out general cleaning in space and how can this be done? Igor Marinin, editor-in-chief of the magazine News of Cosmonautics, spoke about this on the air of Morning of Russia.

The expert noted that the fall of this space debris is practically not dangerous for the Earth. According to him, the panic, which is associated, in particular, with the fall of the American UARS satellite, was provoked by incompetent people. Contrary to fears, the satellite did not fall on someone's head, but sank safely in the Pacific Ocean far from land. "The probability that the debris will fall on some settlement is negligible - less than one ten-thousandth of a percent," Marinin said.

According to the expert, it cannot be said that the problem of space debris has not been dealt with before. This issue has been raised more than once in the UN and international space organizations. “In 1997, a non-binding decision was made that every country involved in space activities should clean up after itself. For example, trash cans were simply thrown out of the Mir station. Now nothing is thrown out of the International Space Station,” he said.

However, collecting the debris that is already in orbit is a big problem. You cannot collect these fragments with a magnet - the magnet attracts steel alloys, and the garbage is mainly duralumin. Japanese experts suggested catching space debris with a net, but this is also not a good option - the debris moves in different directions and at different speeds.

In Russia, this issue is not yet considered relevant at all and funds are not being invested in its solution. However, this debris does not pose a direct threat to the Earth. “Most space debris slowly but surely falls and burns up in the atmosphere. If we now adopt international laws and declarations so that every country engaged in space activities assumes obligations to deal with this garbage, then this problem will not be so urgent. All garbage will self-destruct, and a new one will appear less and less," Marinin concluded.

spaceship graveyard- a common name for the 4 km deep South Pacific, closed to navigation, where the remains of spacecraft fall after they are decommissioned. It is located near Christmas Island,

3900 km from the New Zealand city of Wellington. Most of the spacecraft burn up in the dense layers of the atmosphere, but part of the skin of the ships and other parts that did not burn out when they were taken out of orbit fall precisely into this region. Stations and ships with various kinds of garbage and waste from space expeditions loaded into their compartments are subject to flooding. As a rule, only refractory structural elements reach the water surface. In particular, this area is used by the Mission Control Center (MCC) to flood the Progress space trucks. The remains of the Mir space station were flooded in this area in 2001. The history of the “cemetery” also includes two emergency incidents, when in 1979 the remains of the American Skylab station fell in western Australia, and in 1991 the wreckage of the Russian Salyut-7 station partially crumbled in Argentina. Both cases were without casualties or destruction. In March 2001, during the de-orbiting of the Mir complex, the authorities of Australia, Japan and the Fiji Islands, located at a very impressive distance from the "cemetery", recommended that their citizens not go out into the street, but stay exclusively in residential buildings, institutions and other shelters. Every year, several dozen spacecraft find their last refuge in the oceanic "cemetery". According to representatives of the Mission Control Center of the Federal Space Agency, "the accepted practice of destroying space debris with the help of "trucks" does not harm the Earth's ecology." The area is completely closed to navigation.

The flooding area of ​​de-Earth space stations and disposable cargo ships, known as the "Spaceship Graveyard", is located in the Pacific Ocean at the 40th parallel of the Southern Hemisphere near Christmas Island, away from shipping lanes and populated areas. At the same time, the history of the "cemetery" also includes two emergency incidents, when in 1979 the remains of the American Skylab station fell in western Australia, and in 1991 the wreckage of the Russian Salyut-7 station partially crumbled in Argentina. Both cases were without casualties or destruction. In March 2001, during the de-orbiting of the Mir complex, the authorities of Australia, Japan and the Fiji Islands, located at a very impressive distance from the "cemetery", recommended their citizens not to go out into the street, but to stay exclusively in residential buildings, institutions and other shelters.

Stations and ships with various kinds of garbage and waste from space expeditions loaded into their compartments are subject to flooding. As a rule, only refractory structural elements reach the surface of the water, which then sink to a depth of about 4 kilometers (most of the fragments burn out in dense layers of the atmosphere). Every year, several dozen spacecraft find their last refuge in the oceanic "cemetery". According to representatives of the Mission Control Center of the Federal Space Agency, "the accepted practice of destroying space debris using "trucks" does not harm the Earth's ecology. Source: http://kvazar.org/showthread.php?t=18136 The final orbit of the Mir station. Debris station Mir over the Pacific Ocean Source: http://www.mir.avia.ru/

The final loop of Mir station.

The wreckage of the Mir station over the Pacific Ocean

Source: http://www.mir.avia.ru/

The first European cargo spacecraft "Jules Verne" was also sunk in the South Pacific Ocean, in the so-called spacecraft graveyard in a given area with the coordinates of 40 degrees S.S. and 145 degrees W.D. 2500 km east of New Zealand, 6000 km west of Chile and 2500 km south of French Polynesia, September 29, 2008 at approximately 17:53 Moscow time. Part of the ship's structures burned up in the dense layers of the atmosphere during the de-orbiting of the spacecraft. The ship undocked from the ISS on September 6, after which it was sent to a given section of the ocean for flooding. Source: http://www.cybersecurity.ru/space/56091.html Photograph of the Jules Verne crash: Image source and information about it: http://www.astronet.ru/db/msg/1231393

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The autonomous flight of the Progress M-66 cargo spacecraft is coming to an end, on Monday evening the ship will be deorbited and flooded in the non-navigable region of the Pacific Ocean, a representative of the MCC told RIA Novosti. The ship was undocked from the station on May 6 and sent on a controlled autonomous flight for scientific purposes. At 14:28:30 UTS, the Progress engines will receive a command to decelerate, after which the ship will enter the dense layers of the Earth's atmosphere, where it will burn up. Fragments of "Progress" splash down in the calculated region of the Pacific Ocean at 15:14:45 UTS. The coordinates of the center of the grouping of the fall of unburned structural elements are 42 ° 34 "South latitude and 139 ° 24" West longitude. Source: TsUP

Progress M-67, the last space truck with an analog control system, was sunk in the Pacific Ocean. Interfax was informed about this at the Mission Control Center. The wreckage of the ship, which did not burn up in the atmosphere, fell far from the shipping lanes, about three thousand kilometers east of Wellington, the capital of New Zealand. On September 21, the truck undocked from the ISS and went on an autonomous flight, during which it took part in the Plasma-Progress experiment. Within the framework of this experiment, the characteristics of plasma clouds that arise around the spacecraft during the operation of its engines in low Earth orbit were studied. On the ISS, the expensive Kurs docking equipment was removed from the Progress. The garbage accumulated at the station and the outdated equipment were loaded on board the ship. Instead of the analog "Progress" of the old series, trucks with a digital control system will be used - more reliable and roomy. Two such ships have already been sent into orbit. The first of them delivered cargo to the ISS in November last year.

East of the coast of New Zealand, several thousand miles inland in the Pacific Ocean, lies one of the most incredible landfills in the world. Hidden from the eyes of people, the trash can is surrounded only by the restless currents of the ocean, and there is not a single island in the vicinity. At the bottom, at a depth of 4 km, there is a whole field of broken fragments of old satellites that have long been out of order. This is the “Spaceship Graveyard”, where space agencies from all over the world send their decommissioned satellites and aircraft on their last journey.

When a satellite or orbital station reaches the end of its useful life, there are two different ways in which the scenario for the removal of obsolete equipment from its place of work can develop. If a satellite's orbit is too high, as is the case with geosynchronous spacecraft, engineers send the space scrap farther up into the sky to a landfill orbit, where anything too massive is sent. This orbit is located several hundred kilometers from the farthest trajectory of the controlled satellites. Such a distance was chosen in order to reduce to zero the probability of a collision between decommissioned spacecraft and still functioning equipment.

In the case of satellites that operate too close to the Earth, it is much easier to do the opposite. If the satellite is small enough, it will burn up on its own in the Earth's atmosphere, as happens with hundreds of meteors every day. But if the station is quite large, and there is a chance that it will not completely burn up in the Earth's atmosphere during the fall, its decommissioning requires careful planning.

The old satellite has to be escorted all the way to the water, directed to a strictly defined zone in order to avoid collision with land and especially with human habitats. Space agencies have an obligation to ensure that obsolete technology does not cause accidents and injuries among civilians.

Known as Nemo's Point, the spaceship graveyard is the place in the ocean that is the furthest away from any existing landmass around it. This location got its name in honor of the notorious hero of Jules Verne's book about Captain Nemo. From Latin, this name translates as "no one", which is great for such a remote and isolated place. Point Nemo lies about 2688 km from the three islands closest to it - Duci Atoll in the north, Easter Island (or Motu Nui) in the northeast, and Maher Island in the south. Another name for this place is the ocean pole of inaccessibility. Point Nemo received this status for its maximum distance from all sea routes in the Pacific Ocean. Cruise ships are simply prohibited here.

In addition to the fact that the space dump is at a decent distance from people, it is also practically safe for the marine life of the region. And this is wonderful, because no one would want decommissioned hardware to destroy the local ecosystem. How is this possible in the ocean? It's simple - Point Nemo is located in the southern waters of the great Pacific gyre, which is a large annular sea current. A powerful cycle draws in all household garbage from the nearest coastal waters in the area. For this reason, Point Nemo is practically uninhabited by marine life and has become a kind of oceanic desert, which is also called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Naturally, scientists at one time considered this area an ideal place for space exploration and disposal of spent satellites and waste products of space expeditions.

From 1971 to 2016, more than 263 official space debris disposals were carried out at Point Nemo. Most often, unmanned trucks from the International Space Station drown here. The ISS itself will eventually be buried in this landfill when its service life comes to an end. The approximate date is 2028, but there is a possibility of extending the life of this space object.

ISS. Photo: NASA

The most grandiose funeral at Point Nemo took place on March 23, 2001, when, after 15 years of service, the 135-ton Russian space station Mir was immersed in the waters of the Pacific Ocean. During the deorbit, Mir entered our atmosphere at a distance of 100 km from the Earth. Even in such rarefied air, the station lost some of its fragments at the beginning of its death journey. For example, solar panels fell off Mir almost immediately. And 90 km from the surface of the ocean, the spacecraft fell apart into several parts, and fragments burning in the atmosphere were visible in the evening sky even from the Fiji Islands. By the time of entry into the water, only 20-25 tons of structures remained from Mir.

So if you imagined the space graveyard as a platform lined with satellites and orbital stations gracefully rising above the bottom, you will be disappointed. The remains of these high-tech devices were scattered for hundreds and thousands of kilometers in small pieces. When the World broke up into fragments in the atmosphere, it left a trail of debris 1500 km long and 100 km wide.

Even with the most planned control of space station sinking, it will never be a consistent landing, Holger Krag, head of the European Space Agency's (ESA) space waste office, said. The nature of the destruction of such structures requires experts to prepare a fairly large area for the disposal of the satellite. Fragments will never fall in the same place.

That's why Point Nemo is the best choice. Located 2688 km from any nearest land, it allows space engineers to rely on a fairly wide platform for safety net. This is very important in case of errors in the calculations of possible trajectories of the fall of the remains.

Space Station Mir

The Unmanned Cargo Spacecraft (AGK) named Jules Verne, developed by ESA, disintegrates in the Earth's atmosphere on September 29, 2008 over the uninhabited Pacific Ocean southwest of Tahiti. Photo: NASA.