There’s a lot we don’t know about the International Space Station’s ocean grave

The International Space Station (ISS), which has provided scientific research for more than two decades, is anticipated to say its last goodbye. We have been able to learn more about the Earth, the solar system, and other things thanks to the research hub. Researchers have carried out thousands of tests and studies, from tracking the birth of stars to comprehending the effects of space travel on the human body, during the more than 200 astronaut visits to the station. Nearly all of the main scientific disciplines have been impacted by and changed by this space laboratory.

The scientific explorer Boaty McBoatface has been quite active.

NASA revealed plans for the station's ultimate retirement in 2031 earlier this year, but it's doubtful that the 450-ton lab will be destroyed overnight. Most defunct satellites drift out of orbit when they cease to function, where they eventually burn up in the atmosphere.

However, the majority of the ISS will descend towards Point Nemo, a far-flung region of the Pacific Ocean that many scientists describe to as a "space graveyard" due to the amount of spacecraft that have been interred there.

According to NASA's transition plan for the ISS, the remote area of ocean is the perfect place for a spaceship to crash without potentially harming people or destroying cities. Nemo is Latin meaning "no one," and as the name suggests, there are no people living there. In actuality, it is the Earth's furthest point from any land mass.

The lack of biological variety is one of the reasons Point Nemo is utilized as a trash disposal site; there is hardly any life in the nutrient-poor seas. Leila Hamdan, associate director of the department of ocean science and engineering at the University of Southern Mississippi, claims that at one point, Point Nemo offered a wonderful blank canvas to research a deep underwater area that was absolutely unaffected by the human environment. Hamdan focuses on the deep sea biogeography of shipwrecks and how they alter the biodiversity on the ocean floor.

Large technology, however, provides a completely new set of unknowable variables when exposed to the elements of space. Some are wondering how space exploration eventually affects marine life as the ISS approaches its imminent watery demise.

"We've been placing the remnants of space travel there before we even had the technology to go [to Point Nemo], put deep submersibles in the water, and gather samples from that area," claims Hamdan.

Hamdan claims that it is difficult to determine if launching satellites into the water would have a long-term good or detrimental influence on local ecosystem and marine life. However, she claims that shipwrecks may provide some hints.

The bacteria that surround a shipwreck after it runs aground usually have a greater variety and are crucial to maintaining a healthy ecosystem. However, these objects orbiting the Earth have journeyed through space, unlike ships that sail over the ocean. For instance, the International Space Station (ISS) has decades' worth of experimental tools, materials, and even evidence of changed human DNA. What the craft—and what they carry—will do to the ocean floor of Earth over the long run is unknown.

The project, which is now resting on the ocean floor, "will be a pretty enormous human construction with a lot of human components in it," she explains. It would be naïve to believe that this won't alter the current environment.

This meteor-tracking device may be able to stop a catastrophe caused by falling rocket debris.

One sort of marine debris that contributes to the increasingly pervasive contamination of Earth's seas is space trash. More than 800 marine species have been hurt, ill, or killed as a result of consumer plastics, metal, rubber, paper, and other debris, according to the Office of Coastal Management. Other scientists are less concerned about the ISS's enormous size in compared to other submerged junk, despite the fact that it is larger than the majority of ocean waste.

The International Space Station's volume, according to Cameron Ainsworth, an associate professor of physical oceanography at the University of South Florida College of Marine Science, "is nothing compared to an ocean tanker." The ISS's length from end to end, which is 356 feet, is easily surpassed by an average 700-foot-long tanker, making the station comparable to "a few tons of aluminum tumbling down into the water, which is going to be no more devastating than a ship sinking."

However, a few hundred pounds of debris per vehicle will eventually build up as Earth's orbit gets more congested with space junk.

Erik Cordes, a professor and vice chair of biology at Temple University, asserts that "the ocean isn't an unlimited storehouse, for all of our space trash." Cordes, one of several specialists enlisted to assist in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil leak in 2010, is all too familiar with the harm that human activities can do to marine life.

Although he acknowledges the attractiveness of putting retired spacecraft as far away from humans as possible, Cordes claims that dropping tons of scientific gear in an area where scientists traditionally lack sufficient knowledge can have many "unpredictable" effects.

People frequently imagine the deep sea to be a huge, dirty, desolate desert, but this isn't the reality, according to him. "We are finding more and more truly beautiful habitats, ecosystems, and species on the ocean floor as we do more investigation."

According to Cordes, marine biologists sometimes have to rely on educated assumptions as to what could be hiding at the ocean's bottom. However, more study is required before it is feasible to anticipate what, if any, long-term impact dropping satellites into Earth's seas truly has until they have genuine data, such as high-resolution maps and photographs to scan the deepest sections of the bottom.

Impacts on marine life are anticipated to be minor, according to NASA, which notes in the ISS decommissioning briefing that the space station would burn, disintegrate, and evaporate as it descended through the atmosphere. The thermal forces of re-entry would probably cause some station components to survive and fall to Earth. Within the predicted effect region, there shouldn't be much of an environmental impact from these debris particles.

When PopSci contacted NASA and other government organizations for comment, they informed us that no formal attempts are being made to track space debris once it has fallen into the ocean. Before the ISS starts its decommissioning preparations in 2030, there is still time to look into alternative options or set up marine environment monitoring. Continuing to "explore other footprint targets and ground pathways for station removal to minimize harm the to [sic] Earth's people," NASA said in the transition plan. But it's a waiting game until scientists learn more.

According to Cordes, "we should be investing a little bit of money figuring out what happens when it comes back down with all the money that we spend to put these stuff up there."