MISSION CONTROL CENTER, Korolyov -- Mir came another step closer its death as engines of the Progress cargo ship fired off for the second time tonight to bring the geriatric station down into the Earth's atmosphere.
The engines of the Progress, launched back in January for the grave mission of closing the 40-year history of Russia's sovereign manned space exploration, began the second of the planned three deorbiting burns at 9:01 a.m. ET (2.01 a.m. GMT) to lower the aged outpost's orbit to one with a high point of 135 miles (218.51 km) and a low point of 98 miles (158.95 km) when this 22-minute burn was completed, according to officials of the Mission Control Center in Korolyov.
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Now the station has only one command left to obey before it will come out of the control for what hopefully will be a safe reentry for away from populated lands of Australia, New Zealand and other countries that are located below the station's final path.
The last of the these braking impulses is set to begin at 12:07 a.m. ET (5:07 a.m. GMT) to bring the station down before it can make another orbit around the planet. The heat and friction will first tear away the station's solar panels and cause fuel tanks of the station to explode when Mir plunges down.
Then, Mir's hermetically sealed modules will splinter, ripped from each other to fall away in fragments as the station plungs deeper into the atmosphere. Most of these fragments will burn up before hitting the water, Mission Control head Valeri Blagov said, but some parts, like the ball-shaped, heat-resistant gas tanks, parts of the station's engines and some of its gyrodines will probably survive the overheated plunge and smash into the ocean.
Up to 1,500 fragments weighing a total of some 13-19 tons will survive the planned burning dash through the Earth's atmosphere and hit the surface at around 1:30 a.m. ET (6:30 a.m. GMT) within the ordained splashdown area, an ellipse some 3,700 miles long and 300 miles wide (6,000 km by 500 km), about a thousand miles (1,700 km) from Australia.
There is still a 2 percent chance that Mir will spin out of control during deorbiting, according to the Korolev center's chief ballistics experts Nikolai Ivanov. Theoretically, the station can go into an uncontrolled dive anywhere between 52 northern and 52 southern latitude, Ivanov said -- a zone that is home to 5 out of 6 of the Earth's inhabitants.
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