Well, hopefully not literally... Wired have an article from their man on the ground in Sydney discussing how the Soviets are going to be aiming the dodgy Mir to land somewhere between New Zealand and Chile. Apparently there's no nuclear or chemical evil stuff on board, so if it comes down on your house, you'll just have to content with a few million kilos of steel.

/me gets out baseball glove and gets ready to catch space-debris. :)

Say, are you a size 14?

trog you're back on eh punk?

new hdd?

nah, I've just skanked bits of my old PC together so I can read my mail and slaw on the forums and stuff.. hopefully getting new PC back from the shop tomorrow!@#

damn its good to know u guys are up to date, how long ago was this annpounced again? at least 3 months prob longer.

i bet mir will crash into telstras cable and break it.

or at least thats what they'll tell us

Dilbert, the article is brand new on Wired. Anyway, I didn't know about it, and I'm sure some other people that don't spend all day surfing astronomy sites didn't either.

I always wanted one of those... *points to mir*

dodgy rooski gear ... it'll probly all burn up like tinfoil on re-entry :o) ... & yet ... what of the NEAR spaceship landing on the EROS433 asteroid !! This news is a few days old but it's a great story for getting your noggin around some of them REALLY BIG distances out there in space. The NEAR Shoemaker spaceship was the first man made spaceship to land on an asteroid ! Awesome stuff really that we can whack a bunch of low-tech gear the size of a small car on an asteroid that has an eliptical orbit that swings out almost as far as jupiter & then swings back to being pretty close ( in astronomical terms ) to the earth. & it can still send pack pix !!
But if you really wanna see what stuff them wacky NASA ppl are up to check this -- click 'ere
& now a massive gif to make the modemers groan in chagrin ...
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/9911/lunation_ajc_big.gif

Just visited the NASA page that's tracking MIR, and at the time it was 299 km up, and dropping at a rate of 200 metres per minute

Cover Me!!

kickass gif.

they'll prolly miss the ocean or something. stupid russians.

they'll probably hit and destroy moscow

*Somewhere* between Chile and New Zealand?

Uh...thats a pretty wide area.

So they're just aiming it there...not any specific location?

*Russian points to world map*
"We estimate it will land somewhere here
*Points at the whole map*

They'll miss.