Russian Space Station to Prang in Late MarchRussia's aged space station Mir will crash into the south Pacific Ocean on around March 20, a top Russian Aerospace Agency official said Wednesday.The Mir's destruction could be a day earlier or later than the planned day, Viktor Blagov, a senior space expert, told a news conference at the mission control center outside Moscow. "Everything will depend on the Earth's atmosphere situation and fluctuations in solar activity, which are very hard to predict," he said. The station is currently orbiting at an altitude of 255.1 kilometers, dropping at an average speed of 1.8 kilometers every day. When its altitude reaches 250 kilometers above the Earth, mission control engineers will evaluate the performance of Mir's control system and atmospheric variables, Blagov said. On March 20, Mir's altitude is expected to drop to 220 kilometers. If everything goes normally, the station will take the necessary orientation on March 19, and next day braking thrusts will be programmed in, Blagov said. The first two thrusts will set the descent path, and during the de-orbiting the station will receive signals for triggering the final braking thrust. The descent process will take 45 minutes. The braking will be done under the ground control, but the re- entry and burning-up stages will be out of control, while a U.S. tracking station will observe the fall of the station's unburned parts, the official said. The 137-ton station will enter dense layers of the atmosphere above the Pacific waters north of New Zealand and start to crumble. According to expert estimates, most of the fragments should melt down and burn. The unburned fragments in about 1,500 pieces may weigh some 20-25 tons and should fall in the southern part of the Pacific between Australia and South America over a 6,000-kilometer long and 200-kilometer wide area. Possible damages related to Mir deorbiting will be insured at 200 million U.S. dollars, a spokesman for the Russian Aerospace Agency said Tuesday. Three companies -- Megaruss, AVIKOS and the Industrial Insurance Company will take the insurance in coming days. A group of Russian cosmonauts including Vladimir Titov, Musa Manarov, Sergei Avdeyev, and one of the designers of the station Leonid Gorshkov, will fly in an American plane to the station's sinking area to study the descent results. Gorshkov said the station's entrance into the dense layers of the atmosphere will be monitored from the plane at a distance of 300 kilometers from its descent trajectory. |
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