Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
March 17, 2001, Saturday
Want to see the Mir fall to Earth?
It'll take $10,000 to get close enough
By Seth Borenstein
WASHINGTON _ The fast-approaching fiery disintegration of the Russian space station Mir has some people worrying about falling debris, others eager for a celestial fireworks show.
Don't hold your breath for either, experts advise.
Mir, the largest man-made object ever to fall from space, will be sent into an uninhabited section of the south Pacific Ocean where few people can see it, let alone get hit by it. Its dive is scheduled for 1:20 a.m. EST Thursday.
The 135-ton astronautic tinkertoy _ 170 feet long and up to 90 feet wide _ will plummet into the atmosphere at 17,895 mph after 15 years in space. If all goes according to plan, engineers back in Moscow will guide the station down to about 60 miles from Earth using a remote-controlled rocket attached to Mir.
At that altitude, at a point about 600 miles east of Australia, Mir "will break into many thousands of pieces," because of atmospheric drag, said Boris Sotnikov, deputy general designer for RSC Energia, the company that owns Mir. "The major portion will burn over the Earth, leaving flame-colored quickly vanishing traces in the sky."
Of the fragments, only about 1,500 will survive temperatures of up to 10,000 degrees long enough to splash into the ocean. The biggest will weigh about 880 pounds.
The target area is a 3,000-mile-long, 300-mile-wide section of ocean between New Zealand and Chile. There's little shipping and airplane traffic there.
Is it fail-safe?
"The risk is not zero, but it's pretty close to zero," said John Pike, a longtime space analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, an Alexandria, Va., group that monitors the security challenges of nuclear and space technology.
Some Pacific residents have worried about Mir's fall, just as they did about the uncontrolled but ultimately 1979 fall of NASA's Skylab space station, which proved uneventful.
Unlike Skylab, Mir's descent will be controlled, by Russians on the ground firing the engines of the Progress rocket attached to the station.
Russian space engineers have used the same method to dump about 80 Progress ships and other space objects into the same area of the Pacific, said Nicholas Johnson, orbital debris manager for NASA.
"They've never attempted a re-entry . . . and failed," Johnson said.
Just in case, the Russians have taken out a $200 million insurance policy. They've also asked the United States and European countries to help track Mir's fall.
Splashdowns in a remote area have one unfortunate side effect: "It is unlikely that somebody can observe the sight," Sotnikov said.
If you really want to see Mir's fiery end, Seattle aerospace executive Bob Citron is your man. He's charging up to $10,000 per seat on planes he's chartered to fly within 200 miles of the projected re-entry point. On-board cosmonauts will do play-by-plays.
"We expect to see a spectacular celestial event," Citron said. "We should see the breakup of the Mir space station and the disintegration and incandescence of most of the (five) pressurized modules."
The $10,000 is for a window seat. Aisle seats go for $5,000.
For more information, visit the following Web sites:
Bob Citron's airplane expedition: http://www.mirreentry.com/
RSC Energia's Mir site in English:
http://www.Energia.ru/english/energia/mir/mir.html
Historian Asif Siddiqi's Mir site: http://home.earthlink.net/(tilde)cliched/spacecraft/mirhisto ry.html
NASA's Mir site: http://www.hq.nasa.gov/osf/mir/index.html
ARCHIVE PHOTOS:
Mir.
ARCHIVE GRAPHIC:
20010313 MIR DESCENT, 3 col x 4 in, explains descent, destruction of Mir.
(c) 2001, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
Copyright 2001 Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service
