," said Oni Tangi, activities attendant at the Sheraton Fiji Resort hotel. "I saw hotel guests from the lounge running to the beach and I was wondering, 'What was causing such interest?' I heard two loud sounds like cannon shoots. The powerwent off for about 10 minutes and dark clouds came bowling across the sky following the lights. It was really amazing.""I saw rather high in the sky extremely bright lights, probably four or five large ones, and maybe five or six smaller ones trailing behind," Rob Griffith, a photographer for the Associated Press, told SPACE.com. "A straight line in a very bright vapor stream. It went from right to the left as we were looking out on the beach at Nadi, Fiji. It was a rather moving sight, probably the best scene Ive ever seen in the sky in a long time."
"The electric neon blue-white lights were like magnesium strips on fire, streaming over the horizon traveling from right to left illuminating the sky," said Robert S. Belzer, acting CTO for Mirreentry.com, Inc.. "The sense of exhilaration and excitement was filled with tension as the streams were traveling at lower levels than what was expected. I was in awe of this once-in-a-lifetime experience but very nervous as are expedition leaders had told us we would not see it from the island."
Belzer added that he thought the best footage of the burn up was shot from onboard one of his company's aircraft -- by the sons of some of the passengers.
Joshua Citron who is one of the three boys who got the shot said, "It appeared not to be going past us but all of a sudden moving very fast towards us." His Dad Rick Citron said the airplane they traveled in was 300 miles (483 kilometers) northwest from the other aircraft.
Young photographer James Tur said "It looked like a normal star then I saw burst of energy and followed it." Collin Citron added: "It had big pieces coming off with a smoke trail followed by smaller pieces that could [be] seen through the smoke."
Russians explain Mir's rapid fall
We were very surprised that we did not see this event aboard the aircraft, as we would have expected. It would not have been an exaggeration to say that the dominant thought in our minds on our way back to Fiji was: "What went wrong?" By that time we knew already that people in Fiji had the best view of this historic event.
We got the explanation to this only after we managed to get in touch with Mission Control in Korolyov and Valery Ryumin, the deputy general designer of RSC Energia.
"We decided not to take a risk, and used all the fuel onboard the Progress -- not only the one which was necessary to generate a 20-meter- (65-foot-) per-second speed breaking impulse," said Ryumin. "Due to such action, the final speed breaking impulse was 30 meters (98 feet), not 20 meters per second. We wanted to be sure that the possible debris impact area would not extend to Latin America."
Russian space specialists call such a mode of engine operation a "passing by" meaning that all propulsion hardware, as well as fuel resources on a spacecraft will be literally burned out during the engines operation.
Mission Control specialists in Korolyov made a decision to employ a "passing by" mode of engine operation just a few minutes before the final burn. Even if we knew about right after the decision had been made, we would not have had time to return to Fiji.
"It is lucky that we did not get a bigger jet that would have taken us further down the range of Mir's deorbit path," said Leonid Gorshkov, one of Mir's designers and a Mirreentry participant. "We could have easily been hit by one of the stations fragments."
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