MISSION CONTROL CENTER, Korolyov -- The only visible remainder of the Russian empire's industrial and technological has sped beyond the Mission Control Center's sight and control and is now expected to come crashing to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
Engines of the Progress cargo ship have just begun their third and final burn, firing off at 12:07 a.m. ET (5:07 a.m. GMT) for a scheduled 22-minute, 15-second burn to prepare the station for a fiery reentry that MCC hopes will begin at 12:44 a.m. (5:44 a.m. GMT), when the station will hit the altitude of 62 miles (100 km).
For better or worse, no ground facility will be able to "see" the station in its final 40 minutes of life, MCC chief Vladimir Lobachev told reporters in Korolyov.
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He said even the U.S. Army Kwajalein Atoll facility at the Marshall Islands, which has been tipped to become the last ground facility to track the fall of Mir, has a radar "vision" limited to objects on the level of horizon and will be out of range of the 15-year-old station's terminal splashdown.
If they are lucky, only passengers of a plane chartered by Mirreentry.com will be able to observe the last moments of Mir's life, he said. The station will start disintegrating at an altitude of 62 miles (80 km) and most of it will be destroyed during the reentry, according to MCC officials.
But up to 1,500 fragments weighing a total of some 13-19 tons will survive the burning dash through the Earth's atmosphere and hit the surface at around 1:30 a.m. ET (6:30 a.m. GMT), hopefully within the designated 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.
The speed of destruction
The station would still be flying at a speed of 17,895 mph (8 km per second) when Mir starts to disintegrate, an Energia official said.
While friction will slow the debris down, compact, heavy fragments would be streak to Earth at a speed of 670 mph (0.3-0.4 kilometers per second), he said in a recent phone interview -- a velocity reportedly sufficient to drive some fragments through two meters of concrete.
People in those countries that may see a shower of debris if Mir spins off from the designated zone have already taken precautionary measures. Authorities in Australia, New Zealand and Japan, for instance, have drawn up contingency plans and are taking pains to monitor the station in an effort to calculate exactly where the debris will land.
Even though Russian officials have maintained that Mir will go down safely, the Russian Aviation and Space Agency (Rosaviacosmos) has still taken out a $200 million insurance against third-party liabilities that the fall of the $1.5 billion station can cause.
Minute of silence
But while Australians are nervous, Russians are already grieving. The Moscow-based Mir Support Foundation has called upon Russians to observe a minute of silence at 10 a.m. local time (2 a.m. ET/7 a.m. GMT) to mourn their fallen space station.
The foundation has already appealed to Moscow's leading radio stations to observe this minute of silence while calling on drivers across the nation to honk their signal to commemorate the death of Russia's sovereign space exploration program.
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