"The World" will be flooded by its first visitor
As Interfax was told yesterday at the Mission Control Center, the flooding of the Mir station on the night of March 23 will be supervised by the duty shift led by twice Hero of the Soviet Union Vladimir Solovyov. Ironically, cosmonaut Solovyov, together with Leonid Kizim, was part of the first expedition to Mir in March 1986. As the MCC employees explained, there is no special “red button” for giving a signal to lower the station: everything will be done by the central on-board computer of the Mir, so none of the duty shift “will personally experience moral torment from participating in this sad but necessary process ". The station's engines will issue the first braking impulse at 3.33 Moscow time, the second - on the next orbit, at 5.02. During the next two orbits, MCC specialists will measure the flight path of the orbital complex, determine the state of the atmosphere, and analyze telemetric information. At 8.02, the main engine of the Progress-M1 cargo ship and the station's orientation engines will issue the final braking pulse. As a result, the orbital complex will enter the dense layers of the atmosphere and begin to collapse. The Mir fragments that did not burn up in the atmosphere into a given area of the Pacific Ocean are expected to fall at 9.30 Moscow time on March 23.

Newspaper "Kommersant" No. 49 dated March 21, 2001, p. 1