It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Mir!

Dying Russian space station will be visible in the skies over Valley region this weekend.

January 13, 2001|By CHRIS PARKER Of The Morning Call

If you gaze at the Allentown sky at 6:32 tonight, you might see a quick-moving light arcing east across the darkness. It's the dying Russian space station Mir, drawing closer to Earth as it ends its eventful 15-year orbit.

Although observers will be able to spot the station in the evening skies for a week or so, this weekend will offer the best viewing opportunities for the Lehigh Valley area, said astronomer Kelly Beatty of Sky & Telescope magazine.

Exact times vary according to your location. To find out when best to spot Mir above your community, access

The long-ago pride of the once mighty Russian space program, Mir is expected to be maneuvered into the Pacific Ocean, about 1,000 miles east of Australia, around Feb. 27-28.

"This may be the last time you will be able to see Mir in the evening sky before it doesn't exist anymore," said Beatty, whose fascination with the satellite has earned him the nickname "Mr. Mir."

The space station is bright enough to be seen without the help of binoculars or telescopes.

"This is eyeball astronomy," Beatty said.

Tonight, Mir will come into view in the west. It will quickly climb the sky -- "It takes three or four minutes to cross the entire sky," Beatty said -- until it is just about overhead. Then it will wink out as it passes into Earth's shadow.

Sunday evening, from an Allentown vantage point, Mir will rise at 6:41 p.m. and repeat its trajectory.

This evening looks like the best time for viewing. Forecasters are calling for partly cloudy conditions tonight, but mostly cloudy skies Sunday.

Mir will appear dimmer than Venus, in the southwest sky, but brighter than Jupiter, in the east.

"Mir will be between the two in brightness," Beatty said. "Plus, it will be moving. It's not a momentary flash. It's more like the motion of a jet."

Allentown School District astronomer Gary Becker advises people to "go out a few minutes ahead of time to let their eyes adapt to the darkness."

Becker, who has been director of the district planetarium for 22 years, plans to be on hand when Mir splashes down next month. A friend has invited him to the national observatory in Australia .

The 140-ton space station is spinning 190 miles above Earth at 5 miles a second, Beatty said. It takes Mir about 90 minutes to orbit Earth, which it does 15 times a day.

It's edging closer to Earth by about a mile a day.

"Within the next week or so, they will launch a robotic rocket that will attach to Mir," Beatty said. "Once this is attached, they will bide their time and let it sink."

Around Feb. 27, they will fire the rocket to force it into the atmosphere over the Pacific.

"This thing is so big … you want to do this in a place where the danger of these things falling on someone's head is minimized," Beatty said.

When the Russians launched Mir, whose name means "peace," they intended to keep it in orbit for five years.

"Originally, they intended to replace it with a similar craft, but it became problematic to muster the funds," Beatty said. "The Russian space program is strapped for cash."

Mir is powered by solar cell wings that have to be pointed at the sun, he said. "It is stable now, but a couple weeks ago, it lost power for 40 hours, and there was a danger of it tumbling out of orbit."

Beatty said astronomers do not know why Mir lost power -- and the Russians aren't saying.

The glitch recalled the panic that spread in 1979, when scientists lost control of a U.S. space station, SkyLab.

The difference is that Mir's descent can be controlled with robotic rockets, something American scientists lacked at the time, Beatty said.

SkyLab dropped into the Indian Ocean on July 11, 1979.

Mir was the pride of the Soviet space program as the Cold War with the United States raged in the mid 1980s. In recent years, NASA astronauts visited the station with cosmonauts, and it became a symbol of improved relations in the post-Soviet era.

But the years caught up with Mir. Beatty tracks the fall of the space station with bittersweet emotion.

"Sputnik was launched on Oct. 4, 1957, and now Mir is coming down," he said. "This is the end of an era. Sputnik and Mir can be seen as bookends on the glory days of Soviet space exploration. In a way, it's sad because whatever you might think of the Russians as a country and a political system, they did a pretty good job exploring space."

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Reporter Chris Parker


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