MOSCOW (AP) -- On the eve of the Mir space station's 15th year in orbit -- and less than a month before its scheduled dumping in the south Pacific -- Russian space officials on Monday hailed the craft's achievements and downplayed concerns about its planned fiery plunge to Earth.

''The Mir has lived a wonderful life and must end it in a graceful way,'' Russian Aviation and Space Agency chief Yuri Koptev said at a news conference.

"We must discard it while we are still capable of controlling it, not turn its descent into roulette that threatens the entire global community.''

Koptev said that the outpost would be directed to a stretch of the South Pacific about equidistant between Australia and Chile in mid March. The exact date will depend on solar activity.

Some 1,500 fragments of the station are expected to survive the fiery reentry and fall over an ocean area 120 miles by 3,600 miles (200 kilometers wide by 6,000 kilometers) long, Koptev said.

Yuri Semyonov, the head of the RSC Energia company that built and has been running Mir, said that Mission Control had simulated all possible breakdowns and worked out possible responses. U.S. and European officials are to help Russia with the descent by providing radar observation.

The government's decision to discard one of the last remaining symbols of Russia's superpower status came after long hesitation and has drawn protests from some cosmonauts and hard-line politicians.

Earlier this month, a group of former cosmonauts published an open letter to President Vladimir Putin urging him to revise the ''anti-Russian decision'' to dump Mir. Communists and other hard liners planned street demonstrations on Tuesday.

Koptev and other officials angrily dismissed the protests as a ''political show.''

At the time when the space station was launched on Feb. 20 1986, prospects of its safe dumping were far from space officials' minds as the government poured huge resources into the program, a showcase of Soviet space technology.

''When we conceived the Mir, we didn't think much about its end, the prospect seemed so distant and we had many other things to do,'' said Semyonov.

The generous state funding came to an abrupt halt after the 1991 Soviet collapse, and the space industry found itself struggling for survival.

Luckily for Mir, Russia received a bailout from NASA, which leased time on the station in a bid to borrow Russian experience in long-term space flights. From 1995 top 1998, seven U.S. astronauts spent the total of nearly 1,000 days on Mir.

It was during their tenure that the deteriorating condition of Mir came to the spotlight, exemplified by a February 1997 fire, a near-fatal collision with an unmanned cargo ship in June 1997 and a constant stream of computer failures and other breakdowns.

Last year, Mir was again on the verge of being dumped, but a group of investors called MirCorp reached an agreement with Russia to lease the space station and keep it aloft. However, in November Russia said MirCorp had not met its obligations and made a final decision to terminate the outpost's mission.

"Nothing can last forever,'' Semyonov said, adding that the Mir led the way for new, 16-nation international space station project led by the United States.

Koptev bristled at some cosmonauts' claims that Russia would play a secondary role in the new station.

"Flying a space station that threatens the entire world isn't the best way to show our greatness,'' he said.