The International Space Station (ISS) will be plunged into the ocean at the end of 2020, the Russian space agency said on Wednesday.

The International Space Station (ISS) will be plunged into the ocean at the end of 2020, the Russian space agency said on Wednesday.

But before then, the multinational partnership overseeing how the ISS will be used discussed plans for missions that could extend beyond low earth orbit, with an eye toward Mars, the Moon, or to an asteroid. There's also a chance the station's life could get an extension to 2028, NASA says.

According to reports from Agence France-Presse and others, the ISS will be guided into the ocean at the end of its operable life in 2020. The reason? Space junk, which increasingly poses a hazard to satellites and other missions in Earth's orbit. Mir, the previous Russian space station, suffered a similar fate.

"After it completes its existence, we will be forced to sink the ISS. It cannot be left in orbit, it's too complex, too heavy an object, it can leave behind lots of rubbish," said deputy head of Roskosmos space agency Vitaly Davydov, according to the AFP.

In June, the ISS crew got a scare when a piece of space debris got a bit too close for comfort, prompting them to take cover inside Russian space capsules.

The ISS was originally planned to cease operations in 2013, until an agreement was reached to keep it operating beyond that. Plans for a second agreement, to extend the ISS's life to the year 2028, are in the works, NASA spokesman Kelly Humphries told PCMag.

What's next for the ISS? Davydov said he didn't know, according to the AFP, but he acknowledged the need for a platform for missions in "circumterrestrial space," he said.

Until then, the Multilateral Coordination Board said it began identifying several mission beyond low-Earth orbit, including Mars or the asteroid belt. The ISS members include the United States, Russia, Japan, Canada and 10 European countries represented by the European Space Agency.

The MCB also discussed efforts to increase station use and reported on the status of standardization efforts for rendezvous and proximity operations, interfaces for replaceable items and payloads and command protocols for spacecraft, the MCB said in a statement.

While a mission to the Moon or Mars would capture the imaginations of the world, in the meantime the ISS is being used for other expriments. The MCB outlined the use of the ISS as a national laboratory for U.S. experiments in human heath research with the National Institutes of Health. Private firms are also using the ISS for experiments into vaccine development for bacterial pathogens, gene differentiation for production of new plant cultivars, nanocube scale experiment systems, hyper-spectral imaging for agricultural applications and advanced propulsion technologies.

Other ISS programs include the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, which has collected 2 billion measurements of cosmic rays; the Hyperspectral Imager, which has captured more than 3,500 images of coastal waters; experiments which examine the effects of diet on bone loss; plus other experiments on muscular dystrophy and radiation exposure.

Editor's Note: After the original version of this story was published, a NASA spokesman told PCMag about the plans in the works to possibly extend the ISS's lifespan to 2028. We've adjusted the story to reflect this new information.