mir_chile_islands_010321 SANTIAGO, Chile -- The government of Chile -- whose Easter Island territory is within the "empty" zone where flaming chunks of Mir's space station are expected to splash down -- said Wednesday that it will snub an invitation to attend the deorbiting procedure.
Russia invited
Chile, which is flanked by the Pacific Ocean, to visit its control center to view the descent, but Foreign Minister Soledad Alvear said Santiago told its ambassador not to attend.Moscow plans to bring the 15-year-old space station down on Friday,
somewhere around 1,860 miles (2,993 kilometers) east of New Zealand's southern tip. Chile said it plans to continue its opposition against using the ocean as a burial ground for debris from space.
"We are proposing making an international regulatory framework about this," Alvear said. "We want people to know about the danger that debris from space can pose to the environment."
A press official for Russia's embassy in Santiago said any potentially dangerous substances on Mir's fragments would be burned off during its reentry.
Easter Island dwellers "uneasy"
Airline LanChile said it has shifted Thursday's Papeete-Easter Island-Santiago flight 60 nautical miles north to avoid the zone at risk of being hit with debris. The rerouting will delay the flight by five minutes, it said.
About 2,800 people live on Easter Island, a triangle of volcanic rock marooned in the ocean 2,000 miles from the nearest big population centers in South America or Tahiti -- and potentially in the station's final flight path.
"As we are the most affected ones, we get the least information of all of you," tour operator Conny Martin told Reuters on Wednesday in a telephone interview from the remote outcrop famous for its mysterious, giant stone heads.
"It's business as usual here and we're just hoping that nothing will land on us. What can we do? We can't move out of the way," she said, uneasy at the thought of 130 tons of red-hot space junk crashing down from above later this week.
Other island states issue warnings
The station is expected to fall harmlessly into the Pacific, but from Easter Island to Fiji, residents and governments of the south Pacific micro states were on alert.
Job Esau of the National Disaster Management Office in Vanuatu, a tropical paradise of 182,000 people, said the authorities planned to issue a bulletin Wednesday night and would hold meetings with community leaders Thursday.
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"The things we are going to look at are keeping ships in harbor, people remaining at home," Esau said.
Fiji
warned its 800,000 people Tuesday to stay in their houses after Thursday night, not to set out to sea and to avoid any "foreign objects." Japan has issued a similar advisory. Australia and New Zealand are monitoring the path of Mir and have contingency plans in place, officials said, while airlines would be informed of the space station's position in case they had to reschedule flights across the Pacific.
Tahiti was paying scant attention to Mir's fiery demise as the French territory was distracted by local elections.
But government officials privately complained about Russia using the Pacific as a dumping ground, residents said.
Junk to some, a great achievement to others
Ulafala Aiavao of the 16-member South Pacific Forum said Mir's splashdown was likely to become a rallying point for island state opposition to large countries turning the Pacific Ocean into a "space junk graveyard."
"Mir will raise the profile of that issue," Aiavao said from the forum's headquarters in the Fijian capital Suva.
Fiji, meanwhile, continued to play palm-fringed host to a
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