If all goes according to plan, the Russian space station Mir will fall to a fiery end in the Pacific Ocean about 2,500 miles east of Australia today. According to Eugenie Samuel, in the March 10 issue of New Scientist, the Russians have taken every precaution to avoid having any of the Mir’s debris falling near an inhabited site.

On Jan. 22, a spacecraft consisting essentially of rocket boosters was attached to the Mir to give the necessary thrust for re-entry. These will be fired when the space station is at an altitude of roughly 155 miles, putting it in a rapidly decaying orbit. This is a crucial step because, if the angle of re-entry is too shallow, Mir will skip along the atmosphere “like skipping a stone on a lake,” says Dave Mangus of NASA, and could wind up almost anywhere.

Most of Mir will burn up in the atmosphere, but many fragments, some as large as small cars, will reach the Earth’s surface traveling in excess of 1,200 mph. At this speed, they could smash through 6 feet of solid concrete. The Russians are confident the re-entry will go by the book but have taken out an insurance policy of $200 million just in case.

If something does go wrong with Mir’s end, it would be the last of several mishaps in the star-crossed space station’s career. But, before falling on hard times, Mir had a series of successes that were the envy of NASA and other western space agencies.

The initial Mir module, 43 feet long and 13 feet in diameter, was launched in 1986 and contained command and living quarters for the crews. It was luxurious by space standards with a galley, showers and even a carpeted floor and pictures on the walls. Up or down has no meaning in the near-zero gravity of Mir’s orbit, but these amenities were included to give the crew a sense of normalcy.

Over the years, five modules were added. They contained equipment for research in areas such as botany, electronics, astronomy and the Earth’s atmosphere. The last module was put in place in the spring of 1996, a little more than 10 years from the initial launch and just before Mir was plagued with a series of accidents.

During its 15-year career, Mir has been home to 100 astronauts from 12 countries who have performed more than 23,000 experiments in many branches of science. A joint Swiss-Russian project measured the ratio of helium isotopes in interstellar space, yielding new data on the universe’s origin. French scientists studied the effects of near-zero gravity on fluids, while the Japanese did the same for quail from the egg through maturity. Although the effect of microgravity was studied on a wide variety of living plants and animals, its effect on humans was of most interest to space officials looking toward a manned trip to Mars.

“A great deal of unique medical data from cardiovascular changes to bone tissue loss was obtained,” said cosmonaut Valery Polyakov. He should know, having spent a record 438 days aboard Mir, more than the time needed to make the trip to Mars. The United States weighed in later in Mir’s career, with NASA astronaut Norman Thagard going aboard in 1995, and the U.S. space agency taking more than 20,000 images of Earth from its operating orbit of nearly 250 miles up.

In 1997, there were two potentially fatal accidents aboard the aging Mir. In February, an oxygen canister caught fire and, although the crew was able to contain it, reduced one of the research modules to blackened rubble.

Then, in June, Mir and a supply ship named Progress collided, rupturing Mir’s hull, cutting its electrical power and destabilizing its spin. Miraculously the crew was able to seal off the rupture, restore the power system and stabilize the station, but damage to Mir’s solar panels meant it would have to operate under reduced power. An account of this can be found in the book “Waystation to the Stars” by Colin Foale, father of Mir crew member and British astronaut Michael Foale.

It was at this point that the Russians began to seriously consider abandoning Mir. In August 1999, the Mir crew was brought down to Earth without a replacement. Two cosmonauts did spend some time aboard Mir in 2000, financed by a group of private investors called MirCorp who hoped to convert the derelict craft to a hotel for the wealthy. One American businessman put up $20 million for a trip, but the Russian government decided against the project and Mir’s fate was sealed.

Mir, having reached more than three times its projected life span of five years, will soon be part of space history. It has given space scientists reams of technical data but, as one cosmonaut put it, Mir’s most lasting legacy may have been to teach crews of different nationalities how to live in cramped quarters over extended periods in harmony.

Clair Wood taught chemistry and physics for more than 10 years at Eastern Maine Technical College in Bangor.