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Miles O'Brien: The fallout from Mir

Miles Obrian
 

Miles O'Brien is a weekend news anchor for CNN/U.S. and also serves as the space correspondent for CNN News Group. An instrument-rated pilot with several hundred hours of flight time in a dozen types of aircraft, O'Brien covers all aspects of manned spaceflight, as well as unmanned scientific missions.

CNN Moderator: Good morning Miles O'Brien. Welcome to CNN.com. Whereabouts is the Mir today?

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Miles O`Brien: I knew you'd ask! Let me double check my handy-dandy satellite tracking program! Folks out there might wanna check out a great website. The software is called "Northern Lights" and they make a satellite-tracking program which would allow you to do what I'm doing right now, looking at Mir and where she is. It's downloadable, about $60, very very cool. But anyway... Mir is currently in the middle of the Pacific, traveling along at 17,500 miles an hour. Whizzing along there. I'm trying to translate that into kilometers... but hey, I was a history major! Altitude 142.7 statute miles. Just so you know, this is orbit number 86,273! Mir has about 2.2 billion miles on the odometer! I think it's time to trade it in, whattaya say?

Question from chat room: Does anyone know for sure the day the Mir will touch down?

Miles O`Brien: I just got off the phone from Moscow and talking to some of our people there-- a producer we work with-- and he had just talked to one of the main ballistics people at the Russian Mission Control outside Moscow, and they're now saying the end date on Mir's tombstone will be March 23rd at about 1:20 a.m. eastern time. That'll be about 9:20 a.m. Moscow time. That is one day later than they had been telling us, and the basic reason is that that particular orbit on that day has a better ground track, which makes it less likely that there will be a "Homer Simpson moment" as Mir comes down, you know, "doh-ski".

Question from chat room: With all the space shuttles going up, why couldn't one of the flights push Mir out into space so there would no chance of it hitting anything on earth ?

Miles O`Brien: This is the single-most common question that I have gotten since the Mir story became the Chicken Little story. The easiest way for people to think of it is think of a Saturn 5 rocket that sent men to the moon. It was about 360 feet tall, and had at the top a tiny little payload. That tells you how much energy it takes to get things out of earth orbit. Mir weighs in at about 140 tons, and would need a lot more oomph to leave earth's orbit than the space shuttle or really any other rocket could deliver.

Question from chat room: If the space station goes off track, and becomes a missile gone awry, we in Canada have heard that it could hit one or more of every major Canadian city. Could it, theoretically, hit an outpost in the North Pacific--say Honolulu, for instance?

Miles O`Brien: Here's the really potentially scary thing about Mir. If it does in fact enter out of control, for whatever reason, things don't go according to plan, and Homer Simpson rules, Mir could hit anywhere on the planet between 52 degrees north in latitude and 52 degrees south in latitude. And that footprint extends over five of the world's six billion people. Ironically, and perhaps not coincidentally, one of the few major cities that is NOT in harm's way, is Moscow.

Question from chat room: Miles, have the Russians asked the USA for any help on planning Mir's crash and burn?

Miles O`Brien: This is a delicate issue for both sides. The Russians are very proud and don't want to look as if they need our help to sink their station. The U.S. is very concerned about guilt by association, and so does not want to get too involved, at least publicly, in the de-orbit. Having said that, there is a task force that the U.S. government has established with NASA, the State Department, and the U.S. Air Force, to help the Russians track Mir through the good graces of space command in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and to give them space weather reports from the space weather forecasting facility in Denver. Yes, there is weather in space! Solar flare activity can stir up the atmosphere, causing a little extra drag on Mir, meaning it will drop faster than anticipated.

Question from chat room: What will be the biggest piece of debris from Mir to return to Earth intact?

Miles O`Brien: Good question. I'd be willing to guess that the biggest single piece that will come down might be a docking ring, made of stainless steel, or some of the spherical fuel tanks that hold some of the thruster fuel or perhaps some of the big flywheels on board that were used to help Mir navigate. But it's very difficult to predict, of course, specifically. There could be 1500 pieces and 40 tons worth of stuff. The average size of a piece would be about 50 pounds! Ouch!

CNN Moderator: Will there be any attempts to collect any of the pieces of Mir?

Miles O`Brien: Of course, that depends on where it lands. But if pieces wind up on terra firma, I can already anticipate the ebay offerings! How much would you pay for a piece of Mir?

Question from chat room: What is the expected radius of the debris field?

Miles O`Brien: It's big! It's 100 miles wide by 4,000 miles long. I did some math on this one! That puts it quite a bit larger than Texas, and just shy of the size of Alaska. So, when we talk about 40 tons of debris, it's worth remembering that's over a very, very big swath of the planet.

Question from chat room: If Mir hits my town in Maryland, how far underground would I have to be in order to avoid its impact?

Miles O`Brien: How strong is your roof, is my question! It's really hard to say-- it depends on the size of the piece, how fast it's moving. Some pieces will flutter down, and some will hit the ground at about 300 mph, which is called "terminal velocity," a term you probably don't want to hear right now! We don't want the terminal velocity to be terminal for you! I'd stay tuned that night, and if you're concerned, I'd head for the basement. :) Make sure you have CNN down there!

Question from chat room: Miles, if Mir lands in the Pacific, could it pollute the water?

Miles O`Brien: I guess technically it is littering, isn't it? Most of the fuel will be spent in the process of guiding it down to its intended drop zone, so the tanks will be mostly empty, but of course there's some residual. The fuel isn't pleasant stuff, but most people say that in the 3,000 degree heat of reentry, it will all explode, and should make for one heck of a light show-- if you have either the money to pay for the air charter, or if you happen to be a blue whale out there in the Pacific.

Question from chat room: Miles, did we learn anything from Mir ?

Miles O`Brien: Oh yes. There are a lot of things we learned from Mir, but right at the top of the list, we learned how to efficiently design a space station. If you look at the design of the new space station, Alpha, it's an updated Mir knock-off. The whole concept of linking modules together like tinker toys began with Mir, and will live on with the new station. So, just for that reason, Mir deserves an important place in space history.

Question from chat room: Earlier you mentioned a satellite website - but you never said what that website was -- I work with a youth organization that is very aerospace educational focused.

Miles O`Brien: www.nlsa.com is the place to get that software. Also, we invite you to check out cnn.com/mir. We have some really cool stuff there. If you don't want to spend the money on that software, check out CNN's site, where we have links to web-based satellite trackers, and we have a LOT of other cool stuff, which will help you understand Mir's death throes.

CNN Moderator: Thank you for joining us today, Miles O'Brien!

Miles O`Brien: Stay tuned to CNN all throughout this! We'll keep you posted, and we don't want you to worry, but the sky IS falling!

Miles O'Brien joined the chat via telephone from CNN Center in Atlanta, GA. CNN provided a typist for him. The above is an edited transcript of the interview on Monday, March 19, 2001.



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RELATED STORIES:
New Zealand issues Mir warning
March 16, 2001
Mir death sentence delayed
March 14, 2001
Mir demise causes international high anxiety
March 6, 2001

RELATED SITES:
Mir Space Station
International space station Alpha
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