yuri_journal_010323 Our expedition, organized by Mirreentry.com, Inc., boarded two turboprop aircraft in Suva, the capital of Fiji -- 23 of us on a Brazilia, and 12 on a smaller Bandiarante.
The Brazilia cruised at 28,000 feet (8,535 meters) while the Bandiarante followed it approximately 300 miles (480 miles) behind and at half that altitude. We expected the event between 5:48 and 5:50 p.m. local Fiji time (12:48 and 12:50 a.m. EST; 05:48 and 05:50 GMT).
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We arrived to the observation point at about 5:30 p.m. That gave us at least 15 more minutes to prepare the aircraft and our imaging equipment for the event.
We expected to see Mir rise above the northwestern horizon, then fly above us and ultimately "set" on the opposite horizon so that we could observe it first from one, then the other side of the Brazilia. Although it was not completely dark, we still were in twilight. We shut the windows of the 'non-observing' side of our aircraft so that sunlight would not create a glare on the inside of our viewing windows and block our view of the event.
Cosmonaut and former Mir commander Vladimir Titov sat behind me, along with fellow cosmonaut Musa Manarov. Titov held a GPS in his hand, tracking every maneuver the aircraft made, trying to determine the best viewing angle for the upcoming flare.
Cosmonaut Sergey Avdeev and I sat in the row in front of Titov and Manarov, and cosmonauts Kondakova with Gorshkov sat in front of us. Avdeev prepared his camera and literally tried to hold his breath to avoid fogging the window while looking out. I tried to do the same.
It is hard to describe how strained our nerves became. We were about to see what was to us Russians the show, if not of the Millennium, then at least of the century!
When the minute hand reached 5:45 p.m., we put our fingers on the trigger buttons of our photo and video cameras.
Suddenly somebody screamed: "Here it is!" We all jumped like crazy and started searching for it in the sky. Nothing was there. Suddenly I saw a moving pale blue something. It certainly looked like a satellite. "Got you," I thought. It was not a flare, but I thought maybe the station had not started to disintegrate at that point.
The reality was disappointing. The dot turned out to be just a star in the twilight sky. It was the aircraft's banking that caused the illusion of movement.
There were a few other screams from the people who thought that they saw Mir. One of them did it from the other side of the plane. We all jumped to the opposite windows and started searching the sky like crazy. Nothing. A few more dots peppered the sky, but they looked more like stars and planets "waking up" in the darkening twilight.
At 6:55 p.m. we turned around and headed back to Tonga. The station was no doubt at the bottom of the sea by that time.
On the way back we learned the good and the bad news. The former was that we missed the major view of the event that had been nicely observed from Fiji. The latter was that Josh Citron, 14, one of Bob Citron's sons who was flying on Bandiarante behind us, managed to videotape the event.
The crews of Brazilia and Bandiarante reunited in Tonga where the two craft stopped for refueling and excitingly watched the video taken by Josh. The image clearly showed the dot growing in size to the degree that one could distinguish an object enveloped in flame.
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