Burn, Mir, Burn (Do You Like To Watch?)

Michael Stricklen writes: "The company I work for, NaviSite, Inc. is going to stream the Mir re-entry at http://www.mirreentry.com. I'm not sure what kind of view you'll have of it, but I figure with as many stories as /. has had on Mir, one more marking it's death couldn't hurt." And Kevin points to an article on Yahoo! which says that the mirreentry.com video will not be a live broadcast, "since 'the aircraft which will track the spacecraft's final descent will not have enough bandwidth to stream the footage as it occurs.' The film will be supposedly available on the Internet within two hours of reentry. The site currently target's Mir's 'latest probable deorbit date' as March 22." I wish I saw a link to other than "Windows Media Format" on that page, though.

Comments

Before they burn Mir up...

[Greyfox]

They should dock with it one last time and fill it full of marshallows. Then when it falls on that guy in New Zealand, his family will at least get something to eat out of it...

Any bets on whether the RIAA's trying to arrange for it to land on Sealand?

Re:Before they burn Mir up...

[toofast]

I'd rather have it land on Jean Chretien...

Hey, I'm canadian!

Re:Before they burn Mir up...

[tristan f.]

Of course you are. No one else knows who that is.

Re:Before they burn Mir up...

[Bender Unit 22]

>Any bets on whether the RIAA's trying to arrange for it to land on Sealand?
I've got a better idea, land it in Iraq,
"oooops, we're sorry we crushed your hidden nuclear bomb lab."
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Re:Before they burn Mir up...

[inburito]

The changes of russians dropping mir on one of their friends/allies are just about zero..

Re:Before they burn Mir up...

[MouseR]

Quite frankly, a lot of us would ratter not know him.

Think of him as Canada's Al Gore, but on acids.

Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.

Re:Before they burn Mir up...

[jmv]

Think of him as Canada's Al Gore, but on acids.

I think Dan Quayle would be more appropriate...

Shooting Star

[toofast]

Most of us will probably just see it as a shooting star, if even that. Mir is quite small, and depending on its re-entry speed, I don't think we'll see a whole lot.

Re:Shooting Star

[qnonsense]

• Most of us will probably just see it as a shooting star, if even that. Mir is quite small, and depending on its re-entry speed, I don't think we'll see a whole lot.

Unless you're in the South Pacific, you're not going to see it at all.

Hint: The Earth is curved....

Re:Shooting Star

[top-dog]

Uh, no. Most visible meteorites are about the size of a grain of sand, and the really bright ones are usually no bigger than a pebble. I think a several ton fragment will be QUITE visible over toward Japan and Australia.

Re:Shooting Star

[nihilogos]

Yes Mir is quite small, compared to say a block of apartments. However your average shooting star is not much bigger than a grain of sand, compared to which Mir is quite large.

Re:Shooting Star

[matman]

I saw a satellite re-entry (that's what it looked like, compared to known re-entries that have been filmed) over Nevada about a year and a half ago at Burning Man. Let me tell you, it did not look like just a shooting star. It looked like a tonne of shooting stars all spreading appart burning bright. Very cool. I'll envy whoever sees Mir's re-entry, because I'll bet it's a fair bit bigger than most satellite re-entrys that have been seen before.

Some final thoughts

[perdida]

1) Mir was built, maintained and repaired by a much poorer space agency than the US's, and they kept a functional station in space for over twice its projected lifespan.

2) Over the years cosmonauts at Mir have gathered much unglamorous data about the most efficient and comfortable ways to live in space station conditions for an extended period of time. The physiology and psychology of this is not dramatic or technical but it is crucial.

3) There are many groups trying to profit off of the station's demise, which i think is a bit callous. Is it thrillseeking or morbid interest? At least they could donate money to the Russian space program from these commercial ventures, without some funds the Russian ISS-Alpha committment may not be passed over by the budget-makers axe next time around.

Re:Some final thoughts

[TrollFeeder]

also, the people who keep joking about Mir conveniently forget that Skylab burned up a long time ago.

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Bye bye MIR..

[To0n]

You were the cockroach of Space Stations. Ugly as hell, had it's major problems, and now is going to be watched burned for the enjoyment of Pre and Post adolescent american males.

What a shame.

Re:Bye bye MIR..

[webrunner]

THere haven't been many space stations for Mir to be compared against, you know.
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Perfect use for Iridium?

[no_such_user]

Hey folks - why not aggregate some bandwith from Iridium for applications like this one? Surely you could get some bandwidth from them for cheap with a little cross-promotion marketing deal.

Re:USA failed..

[Ig0r]

If there were no laziness in the US, several industries would collapse overnight.

So being non-lazy is un-American!

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That's pretty close to tahiti!

[agallagh42]

"The latest information on the location of the center of the debris impact area is approximately 2,000 nm south of Tahiti and 2,400 nm east of New Zealand in an area that is completely free of islands and any human habitation."

Wow, 2,000 nm, they're cutting it pretty close ;-)

Re:That's pretty close to tahiti!

[Nater]

The "nm" they are referring to is not "nanometers" as we have grown to expect. The unit they are referring to in this context is "nautical miles". Even so, they're still cutting it pretty close, as there aren't that many places on Earth with no people for 2,000 nautical miles in every direction.

A Mir Retrospective

[FunkyRat]

This week's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday on NPR (hosted by Ira Flatow -- does anyone else remember Ira as host of the great kid's science program Newton's Apple?) had a great retrospective on Mir in their first hour's segment. Among the guests were astronaut Norman Thagard (who did a stint aboard Mir), Russian space expert James Oberg and Brian Burrough, author of Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir.

I highly recommend listening to this program for anyone interested in Mir, it's history and contribution to space science.

This will never work

[Brento]

Their site is Slashdotted right now, and Mir isn't even falling yet! They're not even delivering serious video bandwidth, and they're already crippled. Methinks I'll wait a couple of days after the Mir flameout before I try to pull up this site again.

Then again, maybe this is their devious way of testing whether their server equipment is up to delivering the Mir reentry video. Note to Navisite: beef it up, baby.

Yeah, this'll work....

[Argy]

Considering the site has already been slashdotted into oblivion, and presumably they aren't even streaming any video yet, I wouldn't count on this working within hours of MIR's re-entry.

If I were AOL, Radio Shack, or another of mirrentry.com's sponsors, I'd be a little uneasy with this.

Re:windows media player will work under wine

[andycal]

I was sure it wouldn't, and I just checked to prove it to myself, but shockingly. It worked.

Now, it's clearly not the best solution, I'd like to see platform independent players for all the media formats, and lacking that I'd like to see people stop using formats that are platform specific.

Also, My system is dual-boot, not sure how well it would work on a system where wine doesn't have a real c:\windows directory to call out to.

When I discover stuff like this, I find myself having to reboot less and less......

or, watch it in person!

[brad3378]

I caught a small news bit on the radio a couple days ago about a charter jet that will fly people out to the area where it is expected to land in the ocean.

Better have some bucks though.
It's gonna cost like $5000 per ticket.

For that price, you can be damn sure that I'd be requesting a window seat!

Re:or, watch it in person!

[volsung]

So wait. I pay $5000 for the privilege to be this landing zone of a huge cloud of fast-moving debris? Wow. The US government should bring back above ground nuclear weapons testing, and just sell tickets to be near ground-zero when the bomb goes off. You won't need to experiment on unsuspecting Army soldiers anymore, and you'll get money.

Re:windows media format??

[Lemmy Caution]

I may be wrong and I'm not in a position to confirm at this time, but I believe that the avifile libraries play back windows media format files. The Windows media file format is documented and playback can be implemented across platforms. Unlike Sorenson-encoded Quick Time files. (One of the reasons I consider Apple more hostile to open computing than Microsoft is.)

Scientific eduation...

[fm6]

"Reportedly, only one person has been struck by debris from a reentering satellite in the history of our use of space--about 40 years. Fortunately, this person was hit by a lightweight object and was not injured. "

Gee whiz guy, it isn't about size, it's about kinetic energy. At least that's what Mister Winchester told me.

Here's NASA's real-time tracking site.

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Re:Scientific eduation...

[FTL]

>Gee whiz guy, it isn't about size, it's about kinetic energy.

The item in question was a peice of wire mesh from a Delta rocket that hit a woman in Tulsa, Okla back in the 1960s.

Terminal velocity for wire mesh is about 1m/s. You are absolutely correct that it's about kinetic energy, not size. But in this case the kinetic energy of 100g moving at 1m/s is not something one has to worry about.
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Mutant Fungus Aboard Mir

[Skynet]

According to this article, mutant fungi has developed on Mir that is highly toxic and corrosive. You heard me, mutant fungi. Is it right for us to destroy Mir? By destroying Mir we are destroying a new life form. We are playing fungi-god.

There may be uses for this fungi. The next big pizza topping? It may have good hallucinogenic properties? (i.e. mutant "shrooms"). Good in a chef salad?

On a serious note, we should preserve some of it before it is burned up in reentry. It would allow us to study how organisms evolve in a completely isolated environment, and one that is free of predators. Apparently the fungi was really wreaking havoc on the station, destroying hosing and electrical components.

We're going to be spending a lot of time in space from now on, we need to know about this sort of phenomenon so we can take steps to stop it. The only way man will be able to economically live in space for long periods of time is in a symbiotic relationship with oxygen producing plant life. If that plant life mutates out of control we have a big problem.

Why not link Mir to ISS Alpha?

[cdlu]

I've never seen any answer to why the Mir space station hasn't been included in space station alpha instead of jetisonned. It would probably be cheaper to upgrade Mir and attach it to the new space station than it would be to build all kinds of new components that do what it does anyway. Does someone have an answer?

(And what would a hybrid be called? Mir++?)

Re:Why not link Mir to ISS Alpha?

[FTL]

> I've never seen any answer to why the Mir space
> station hasn't been included in space station
> alpha instead of jetisonned.

I am not an aeronautical engineer (IANAAE), so I'll just be touching a couple of points that I can think of. The reality will be much worse.

First, there is the question of orbit. Mir is in the wrong orbit. Mir's orbit is inclined so far that Atlantis is the only space shuttle that can get to it and carry the slightest bit of load. If we were to use Mir, we'd either have to change it's orbital inclination (using dozens of Russian progress tankers), or forget about the US being able to participate in any meaningful way.

Secondly, Mir vibrates too much. ISS's biggest headache is to keep the station extremely still so that experiments like crystal growth can be cunducted. Bolting noisy old Mir onto the side of ISS would destroy your ability to do good science.

Thirdly, you would loose Mir's zero-gravity lab. On a space station complex, only the module at the station's center of gravity has true zero-gravity. All other modules have a very slight gravity pulling the contents towards the outside of the station. The larger the station, the worse this gets. It is enough that crystal growth experiments can't be conducted anywhere but one place.

Fourth, Mir doesn't meet ISS's safety code. The rules on ISS are that no single failure can endanger the mission objectives, no double failure can endanger the crew. Mir was built using a more economical philosophy whereby if duct tape would fix it, it was ok.

Fifth, ISS was designed from the ground up to be maintained robotically. Up to now we've seen one (dangerous) space walk after another. This practice stops as of the next mission. That's when Canada's robotic arm gets installed. Every part of ISS is designed to be accessible to this arm. There are data grapples, optical markers, and other aids all over. Spacewalks will become extremely rare. Mir has no provision for external robotic maintenance.

Sixth, Mir is way beyond the end of its life-span. Things are starting to break and wear out at an alarming rate. Much of the crew's time is spent just keeping the station alive. Starting from scratch means you can spend more time on science then fixing the ventalation system.

As I said before, I am not an aeronautical engineer, and the preceeding would just be the tip of the iceberg. It is certainly simpler to start from scratch, having learned the lessons of Mir.
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It's about ballistics

[localroger]

In the article "chronology" it is mentioned that lightweight trash and foam are among the items expected to survive. They quickly lose their momentum because they don't have much mass and flutter down like snow.

Why destroy Mir?

[FTL]

Could someone please tell me why Mir has to be destroyed? I grant that Mir is now obsolete, and that keeping it functional would cost more and more as the years go by. But instead of crashing it into the Pacific, why is it not feasible to use the same fuel to boost it into an orbit that will last for a century or so, then shut it down, vent the atmosphere, and leave it?

Throughout history we are quick to destroy anything that is obsolete, without thinking that within a short period of time the offending object will become historic and priceless. "Colossus" the first computer, "Rocket" the first locomotive and all the great airships are just some examples of things that were destroyed without a thought to posterity.
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Watch the orbit of Mir and other Satellites

[alexjohns]

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/realtime/JTrack/Space craft.html

Really, really, cool stuff.
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Interview with a cosmonaut

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

I read an interview with a cosmonaut that spent more than 2 years there. He said that Mir's time was past. Some of the components were more expensive to repair than starting again. Though, he didn't understand why some of the equipment wasn't salvaged. It was very costly.

He also missed some of his personal things (books, a computer) that he had to leave in the station. So if you are in the Pacific and want a Russian laptop, one could fall onto your hands.
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