SPACE watchers are standing by for the big splash next week when Russia’s Mir
space station is due to plummet into the Pacific. But bringing down the most
massive man-made object in space will not be easy. The station has little power
for manoeuvring, could be thrown off course by solar activity, and its irregular
shape makes predicting its trajectory difficult.
Dave Mangus of NASA, who helped bring down the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory
last June, says such manoeuvres are nerve-racking. “We lost a lot of sleep over
it,” he says. Mir weighs 130 tonnes, nine times as much as Compton, so Russian…
