The ‘spacecraft cemetery’ is the final resting place for hundreds of rockets and satellites

By Dyllan Furness June 14, 2016

Creative Commons

Bad things happen when spacecraft aren’t safely decommissioned. In 1978, NASA scientist Donald Kessler considered a scenario in which collisions between low Earth orbiting objects create more and more debris in a domino effect that may one day make orbit – or even spaceflight – impossible. We saw the ramifications of this in 2009 when American and Russian satellites collided and created thousands of small but dangerous pieces of debris, some of which ended up in the International Space Station’s (ISS) flight path two years later.

Luckily, the European Space Agency is investigating means to remove dangerous debris from space. But massive nets and robotic arms aren’t the only ways to get objects out of Earth’s orbit – they can also be instructed to crash into a “spacecraft cemetery” once their service is complete.

Recommended Videos

Russia has already buried over 190 objects in the cemetery (formally known as the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility), which comprises a patch of Pacific Ocean 2,000 miles north of Antarctica, reports Popular Science. The United States meanwhile has crashed 52 objects there, Europe has crashed eight, Japan six, and SpaceX one.

The goal is to keep these decommissioned objects out of orbit and at a safe distance from any human being. When orbiting objects return to Earth’s atmosphere, they’re often accompanied by immense heat and destruction. By crashing the objects in this isolated region in the Pacific Ocean, NASA and others calculate a less than 0.0001 percent chance that an object or part of its debris will kill a person upon its reentry.

ISS still has more than a decade left in service but will find its final resting place in the space cemetery around 2028. The mission to decommission and return will be tremendous and quite a spectacle, as the 500-ton, football field-sized station comes barreling down to Earth. But we don’t recommend you hang around the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility around that time.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Contributor

Dyllan Furness is a freelance writer from Florida. He covers strange science and emerging tech for Digital Trends, focusing…

Space

Asteroid impacted by spacecraft is reshaped like an M&M ‘with a bite taken out’

In 2022, the world watched with fascination as NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid in a test of what kind of defense options might be available to humanity if an incoming asteroid ever threatened Earth. Observers could tell very quickly that the test, called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test or DART, was successful in changing the asteroid's orbit. But now astronomers have learned more, finding that the impact may have reshaped the asteroid significantly.

The asteroid impacted, called Dimorphos, is very small at around 500 feet across, and the DART spacecraft crashed into it at a tremendous speed of nearly 4 miles per second. Researchers have now used computer modeling to see the effects of this impact, given the limited amount of information we have on the composition and uneven surface of Dimorphos.

Space

Dramatic images show a large satellite tumbling toward Earth

An illustration of the European Space Agency's ERS-2 satellite. ESA

The European Space Agency (ESA) has shared remarkable images showing one of its satellites in what it describes as a “tumbling descent.”

Space

One last orbit: how and why NASA kills its own spacecraft

For more than a decade, NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has been searching the sky for near-Earth objects. Using its infrared vision, the spacecraft, which sits in orbit above Earth's surface, has looked out for asteroids and comets throughout the solar system and has been used to identify those that could come close to Earth.

You might recognize the name because it was used for one of the mission's discoveries, comet NEOWISE, which was the brightest comet in over 20 years when it zipped past Earth in 2020.