NORAD to help bring down Mir

The Gazette
Published Monday, March 05, 2001

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- Space experts in a Colorado military installation will track the 260,000-pound Russian Mir Space Station, the largest object ever put in space, as pieces of it return to Earth.

This month, Russia plans to ''deorbit'' the 15-year-old Mir in a controlled descent in which parts that don't burn up from the pressure of re-entering the atmosphere are expected to fall harmlessly into the South Pacific.

The Russians will use their own systems to track the 100-foot long, 90-foot-wide malfunctioning Mir as it leaves orbit, but they also have accepted help from the U.S. government. The help will come from the Space Control Center in Cheyenne Mountain, which tracks roughly 8,300 man-made objects in space -- from space junk to satellites.

Officials from U.S. Space Command, which has the mission, declined to talk about it because details are being finalized by the U.S. State Department. However, the command's Web site details the Mir mission.

The site says the Russians maintain that deorbiting Mir is solely their responsibility, but that they are willing to accept help.

''In addition to ongoing communication between NASA and the Russian Aviation and Space Agency, Rosaviakosmos, (the Department of Defense) will share its tracking data to give Rosaviakosmos better information during Mir's descent,'' the Web site says.

The Russians say they are confident Mir's debris won't hit land, but other objects coming out of orbit, such as the U.S. Skylab and a previous Russian space station, have struck land. There have been no reports of space debris hitting anyone.

Tracking Mir back to Earth is the latest example of cooperation between the former Cold War enemies.

In 1999, the Russians and Americans created the Y2K missile-warning center at Peterson Air Force Base, where together they watched information stream in from Cheyenne Mountain. The purpose was to guard against a computer glitch that could make one of the countries mistakenly think it was under attack and retaliate.

Officers from both countries played war games as allies at Schriever Air Force Base last month.

For the latest mission, the Space Control Center, located deep inside Cheyenne Mountain, won't do much more than it does every day.

Since the 1970s, workers in the mountain have tracked objects in space.

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