Check out our Interactive Mir graphic to see what the cosmonauts will leave behind, and stay tuned to SPACE.com for full coverage of the undocking and landing of the Soyuz spacecraft.

In recent days, the cosmonauts have busied themselves prepping the station for dormant flight. Using the Progress cargo ship currently docked to Mir as a kind of trash can, they are loading it with used equipment. Later this week the hatch to the spent resupply craft will be sealed so it can eventually be cast off by ground controllers in the coming months.

On Tuesday, the cosmonauts also installed new ventilation ducts in the station. They are designed to improve air circulation during Mir's un-piloted flight.

Mission Control, located in the town of Korolev, near Moscow, plans to send a final wake-up call to the cosmonauts around 5 a.m. EDT (09:00 GMT) on Thursday.

After wrapping up their final chores, the cosmonauts will enter a Soyuz TM-30 spacecraft currently docked to the station. Around 2:10 p.m. EDT (18:10 GMT), they will close the hatch separating the Soyuz from the station.

After pulling away from the station, the cosmonauts will fire the Soyuz's engine to deorbit. Immediately after, the reentry capsule holding the crew will separate from the other two sections that make up the Soyuz -- an instrument module and a logistics module, both of which will burn up in the atmosphere.

A critical phase in the crew's return home comes when their bell-shaped capsule enters Earth's atmosphere at 6.9 kilometers per second. A bubble of plasma caused by air friction will completely envelop the capsule, preventing ground communications with the crew inside.

As the craft slows down during its approximately 45-minute descent, a parachute should start deploying at an altitude of about 6 miles (10 kilometers).

Shortly before landing, a heat shield at the bottom of the capsule should separate, exposing solid-fuel retro-engines that fire a few feet above the ground to soften the touchdown.

The officials at RKK Energia, the company that operates Mir, expressed confidence this week that the station would see another crew.

The current mission was made possible by the Netherlands-based MirCorp, a private company that rented the station from RKK Energia for commercial purposes.

MirCorp was viewed by many as a hopeless venture when the mission was launched in February, but the company has recently disclosed it is negotiating several deals with potential clients who would send paid "citizen explorers" to the Russian outpost.

The first paid cosmonaut could travel to Mir with the next crew. That mission could come as early as November, according to RKK Energia.

In order to meet this deadline, a potential passenger should start training for the mission as early as July, said Yuri Grigoriev, the deputy designer general at RKK Energia.

"A lot should be done before that," Grigoriev said. "The contract should be signed, the flight program developed, the first payments [from the customer] delivered. So this flight could very well take off in January."

The mission, which would be the 29th long-duration flight to Mir since the station's launch in 1986, would last around 30 days, the officials said.