Australian emergency services and armed forces have been placed on alert as the troubled Russian space station Mir makes its descent to Earth.
Up to 1,500 fragments will survive re-entry and with five or six fragments expected to be as big as small cars travelling at 1 kilometre per second, any mistake in plotting Mir's final path could be catastrophic.
Australia may be over 2,000 miles from the intended splashdown point around halfway between Chile and New Zealand but it has been hit by space debris in the past and this time round the country is nervous.
Mir, which is being brought down because of its age, has been fitted with a number of rockets which will be ignited to slow and control its descent as it nears the Earth. But if these were to malfunction, controlling the craft would be a much more difficult proposition. Australian nerves have been further frayed by the fact that Mir has had so many problems in the latter part of its extended term in space.
Perhaps most worrying was Russia's loss of contact with the station for 24 hours last month. Coupled with all of this is Australia's already uneasy relationship with debris from outer space.
In July 1979, NASA's 77.5 tonne Skylab, after six years in space, surrendered to the Earth's gravitational pull, re-entered the atmosphere, and broke up with debris crashing into the Indian Ocean and Western Australia. Nobody was killed but the sonic boom from the particles woke sheep farmers from their sleep. The local Esperance Town Council vented its spleen at the incident by giving NASA a $200 ticket for littering.
In 1989 Australia was once again in the wrong place at the wrong time when a Soviet Cosmos satellite fell in Central Australia. Again, nobody was injured.
More recently, in November 1996, the failed Russian Mars- 96 space probe carrying radioactive plutonium crashed towards the country but nobody thought to tell the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard.
Defence Department emergency planners later said they were too busy implementing a Yellow Alert, the second-highest level of radioactive emergency, to tell the hapless Mr Howard. Instead the first the Prime Minster knew of the possible disaster was when then president Clinton phoned him about the matter over two hours after the initial warning was given. In the end the probe, which had failed shortly after take-off, landed in the Pacific Ocean.
This week, the Australian authorities were at pains to demonstrate they are better prepared than five years ago.
Emergency Management Australia (EMA), a division of the Department of Defence, on Monday summoned members of the press to a briefing in Sydney to explain the country's contingency plan in the event of anything going wrong. It made for somewhat unsettling listening.
The director general of EMA, Mr David Templeman, said all of the emergency services and armed forces had been briefed and were ready to move in and mount rescue missions should the need arise.
"Due to the variable nature of the atmosphere and the shape of Mir, its performance is unpredictable," he said.
The international space community was confident in the Russian government's ability to safely de-orbit Mir, he added.
