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With two engine burns, Mir was put on course for a 5,400-degree return home before the world's eyes.
Compiled from Times wires
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 23, 2001
MOSCOW -- Losing altitude fast, the space station Mir passed the point of no return Thursday in its much-lamented final descent back to the planet where gravity and friction waited to shred it into 15,000 pieces in a blaze of fire and molten chunks of metal. The fragments were expected to crash into a broad swath of the Pacific between New Zealand and Chile around 1:30 a.m. today.
From observation aircraft, on television and on the Internet, much of the world waited to catch a glimpse of the man-made meteor shower that Mir promised to deliver as it streaked through the last of the more than 86,330 orbits it will have made around the Earth.
At 7:30 p.m. Thursday, engines of a cargo ship attached to Mir fired for 21 minutes as the station circled the globe just below the Equator, over the Indian Ocean. Mission Control said Mir's flight was stable and the computer-controlled system was maintaining the station's course.
With this burn of the Progress cargo-ship engines -- and a second one 90 minutes later -- Mir's demise was sealed. The aim was to slow Mir and put it in an elliptical orbit.
A final blast, scheduled around midnight, was to hurl the station into the Pacific shotgun-like at 15,000 mph. Its target area was 120 miles wide by 3,600 miles long, and centered roughly at 44 degrees south latitude and 150 degrees west longitude. Most of the station would burn up during re-entry -- temperatures were expected to reach more than 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit.
But the remaining chunks, the equivalent of 20 Volkswagen Beetles, were expected to reach the Earth's surface, scattered over a long swath. Some 1,500 fragments of 40 pounds or more were expected to fall over the zone.
Space officials said debris would be traveling so fast that it could smash through a block of concrete 6 feet thick.
Space officials voiced confidence that they could carry out a safe descent, pointing to their experience in dumping dozens of Progress ships and other spacecraft into the same area.
But Mir was by far the heaviest spacecraft dumped, and its size and shape made it difficult to exactly predict the re-entry.
A fleet of fishing boats in the zone insisted on staying put because tuna were biting, said Wayne Heikkila, general manager of the Western Fishboat Owners Association.
Thirty-five space buffs and scientists were in the South Pacific to chase the plunging station; participants were optimistic that they would catch sight of Mir in a 200-second window of opportunity.
And Taco Bell set up a 40- by 40-foot vinyl target -- emblazoned with the company's logo and the words "Free Taco Here!" -- 10 miles off Australia. In the extremely unlikely event that Mir hit the target, the company promised free tacos to all 281-million Americans.
But to Russians, Mir's demise was no joke.
The Soviet Union, which no longer exists as a nation, launched the 134-ton laboratory into space 15 years ago, and Mir's plunge reminded many Russians on Thursday of glories lost and not fully replaced by Russia's participation with the United States and 14 other countries in the international space station.
"I am especially sad these days," Anatoly Solovyov, the Russian astronaut who spent 651 days on Mir in the course of five missions, said. "An entire era of our Soviet space program is ending, into which we invested not only our money, but what is more important, our intellectual potential."
-- Information from the New York Times and Associated Press was used in this report.