One future visitor to this desolate place will be the International Space Station.

 

Current plans are for it to be decommissioned in the next decade and it will have to be carefully brought down in the oceanic pole of inaccessibility. With a mass of 450 tonnes - four times that of the Mir space station - it will make a spectacular sight.

 

Tiangong-1's orbit is decaying as it heads towards re-entry. But Chinese engineers have lost control of it and cannot fire its thrusters to bring it down in the South Pacific.

 

Instead it will come down somewhere between 42.8 degrees north and south. That's between the latitude of northern Spain and southern Australia, and we won't be able to be more precise than that until just a few hours before it burns up.