Pacific ditching for Mir in February

Borrowed time: Russia says systems on Mir could go wrong at any time

MOSCOW, Russia -- The aged Mir space station will be ditched in February in a controlled descent that will send it hurtling into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean, Russia's Cabinet has said.

The Cabinet approved a plan on Thursday to crash the 14-year-old Mir into the Pacific east of Australia, Russian space agency chief Yuri Koptev said.

Koptev said the target dates for bringing the space station down are between February 27 and 28.

He said the decision was made to bring the station down "to prevent its uncontrollable deorbiting."

Koptev added: "Mir is in such poor condition any of its systems can go at anytime."

REFERENCE Facts about Mir     INTERACTIVE Cult 3-D Models of Mir and Soyuz     MESSAGE BOARD Can the Mir be brought down safely?

Officials have wrestled for months over what to do with the Mir, which Moscow can no longer afford to maintain.

They decided to discard the 140-ton station -- once a symbol of Soviet space glory -- after attempts failed to find private investors to come up with funds to keep it in orbit.

NASA has urged Russia to dump the Mir and concentrate its scarce resources on the new International Space Station, a 16-nation project led by the United States but using some Russian technology developed on Mir.

The Russian government decided to abandon the Mir earlier this year, but extended its lifetime after the private Netherlands-based MirCorp leased time on Mir and paid for its operation.

MirCorp has pledged to raise more money to keep the station aloft, but the government has grown increasingly skeptical about the company's ability to do so.

Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov told Thursday's Cabinet that Russia had an international commitment to safely discard the Mir.

"One of our obligations is to ensure the safety of the final stage of the Mir's flight," he said.

In calling for careful preparation for de-orbiting the Mir, Koptev on Wednesday recalled a Soviet satellite that crashed into northern Canada in 1978, in a major embarrassment for the Soviet leadership.

Nobody was hurt but radioactive fragments were scattered over the wilderness.

The unoccupied U.S. Skylab space station fell to Earth in 1979 when its orbit deteriorated faster than anticipated, scattering debris over western Australia. No one was injured.

A possible scenario for lowering the Mir's orbit safely involves a cargo ship docking with the station, and then firing rockets to push the station quickly into the atmosphere over an unpopulated area.

Officials have said they may send up a new crew to the Mir in January to prepare the craft for the final descent.

Much of the giant spacecraft will burn up on re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere before the rest ditches into the sea.

The Mir cluster of six modules, bristling with solar panels and antennae, has far outlived engineers' original expectations.

The inside is scarred by a 1997 fire and one module, Spektr, is sealed off after a collision that year with a small craft ferrying away the station's garbage.

The Associated Press & Reuters contributed to this report.

Russia plans to dump Mir space station
October 23, 2000
U.S. tourist plans to visit Mir by 2001
June 19, 2000
Future of Mir in doubt after cosmonauts return home
June 16, 2000
Soyuz rocket docks with Mir
April 6, 2000

Mir Space Station
MirCorp
Russian Space Agency
NASA

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