HOME	The Mir Space Station

Mir Facts:

Built By: Soviet Union, now Russia Cost: $4.2 billion to build and maintain Built: from 1986 to 1996 Weight: 135 tons Volume: 9,900 cubic feet Inclination: 51.6 degrees Size: 63 x 85 ft

The Mir (it means Peace in Russian)

Crews: Mir hosted 104 cosmonauts, astronauts, and visitors

Missions: 46 flights were made to Mir

Longest Stay: Cosmonaut Valery Polyakov holds the record for the longest stay in orbit, 438 days.

Most Days on Mir: Between his three separate missions to Mir, cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev totalled 747 days -- the longest total for any human staying in space.

The Mir burning up as it re-enters the atmosphere

The Mir space station had been sailing through space for 15 years.  But its adventure ended in March 2001.  The Russian Space Agency pointed Mir down toward the Earth.  As it traveled down through the atmosphere, it heated up and broke apart.  Most pieces of Mir will got so hot, they burned up.  Some of the biggest pieces made it all the way back, but they plunged into the South Pacific Ocean far from any people. You would think that something as large as Mir hitting the Earth is very rare.  But scientists who keep a check on what's flying around near planet Earth say a 135-ton object zooming in from space happens fairly often.   Meteors from space, "weighing as much as Mir, hit Earth maybe 10 times each year," says Bill Cooke at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center.  "Military satellites record the flashes of their explosions in the upper atmosphere."

Since the Russians began building Mir in 1986, it has survived a fire, collisions with other spacecraft, and even attacks on its wiring by microbes that ate metal and glass!  We have learned a lot from Mir about how to live and work in space.  But Mir didn't work very well any longer, and its orbit was failing. It has been replaced by the new International Space Station, where the USA, Russia and many other countries work together. It also cost a lot of money to keep it running.  So Russia brought Mir down into the ocean.  They were careful that none of Mir's pieces hit places where people live.

Cosmonaut Yuriy Onufriyenko in the cluttered Mir Base Block Module.