[meteorite-list] The End Is Mir / manmade meteorites

From: Alexander Seidel <ase_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Thu Apr 22 09:44:38 2004
Message-ID: <3AAD1B7D.B18F7CB2_at_planet-interkom.de>

Ron Baalke wrote:
>
> Fortunately, there's still time to see Mir from the safety of your own back
> yard. The rapidly-moving space station reflects sunlight and if you're
> outside at the right moment -- usually near local dusk or dawn -- Mir will
> appear as bright as a streaking first or second magnitude star.
> Science_at_NASA's online satellite tracking utility, JPass written by Patrick
> Meyer, can tell you when and where to look.
> Russia's fabled space station is easy to see, but don't wait --because the
> end of Mir ... is near.

I luckily, and (for me) finally, saw it from a flat hotel rooftop in
downtown Barcelona, Spain, on March 9th, a -0.5 mag "moving star" just
before it entered earth´s shadow at 70 degrees horizontal altitude high
in the NE (at around UTC 1907.5). A nice final show over the city lights
after all those years that I´ve tracked it from much less light-polluted
areas further to northern latitudes.

It will make a very spectacular reentry one of these next days over the
southern Pacific, but with probably only few, if any human spectators
out there to watch it "life", for safety reasons. Some pieces will
surely make it back to earth but with only very little chance that one
can ever get a piece of it into the personal "outer space" collection,
as was once possible with the Skylab fragments and the Salyut tanks,
which landed over Australia and South America respectively. Well, at
least we can hope that chances for this to occur will almost be zero, as
is likely, unless anything goes wrong with the planned controlled
descent there, and debris falls over land.

Alex

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Received on Mon 12 Mar 2001 01:54:53 PM PST