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Later this month one of the brightest lights in the sky will fall into the Pacific Ocean.

Mir, the Soviet-era space station, will be a victim of gravity and the end of the cold war when it splashes down somewhere east of Australia. Mir - the name means "peace" and is pronounced "meer" - has been circling the Earth for 10 years (although its orbiting assembly began four years previously) and, after more than 83,500 orbits, is now due for retirement.

Over the years the Mir crew has been made up of Russians, Americans and an Australian, and the space station has had some dramatic adventures, near misses and crises. Mir's 1995 docking with US shuttle Atlantis marked the first steps in the effort to build the new International Space Station.

• How do the weather, the tides and the position of the Earth affect the splashdown position?
• Given past problems, can Russian ground control guarantee sufficiently stable communications with Mir to guide its re-entry?
• What happens if there is a delay in entering the Earth's atmosphere?
• Why was Mir so affected by technical problems? Will the International Space Station have the same problems?

• Nasa's Liftoff site tracks the position of Mir, the International Space Station, and the shuttle Atlantis (http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/temp/StationLoc.html).
• CNN's coverage features several stories on the role of the United States in the Mir project. A 3-D model of the space station can be maneuvered 360 degrees (http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9707/mir/).
• SpaceViews, a journal about space exploration, has a collection of articles about MIR (http://www.spaceviews.com/2000/12/09a.html).
• SpaceView's Mir Interactive Display shows illustrates the different parts of the space station and explains their functions (http://www.spaceviews.com/features/mir/display/).
• Maps of the Pacific Ocean - Mir's splashdown destination - can be found at Travelsmarter (http://www.travelsmarter.com/mappi.htm) and at the site of the University of Texas library (http://www.lib.utexas.edu/Libs/PCL/Map_collection/cia00/Pacific_Ocean_sm00.jpg).

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