ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 3, 1991                   TAG: 9102030236
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A13   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: MOSCOW                                LENGTH: Medium

SOVIET SPACE STATION'S FALL EXPECTED THIS WEEK

Pieces of the Soviet Union's 40-ton Salyut space station and an attached spacecraft will fall to Earth on Wednesday or Thursday, but it is not known where they'll hit, a newspaper reported Saturday.

Although most of the Salyut-7 space station and an attached Cosmos-1686 cargo ferry will burn up in the atmosphere, a piece weighing about 3 tons is expected to survive and strike the Earth. Other smaller pieces also are expected to survive the atmosphere.

The military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (Red Star) reported that the biggest danger is from pieces of the cargo spacecraft, which is docked to the space station.

Soviet air force Col. Gen. Volter Kraskovsky told the newspaper that experts tracking the doomed "inseparable couple" will know closer to the time of re-entry exactly when and where debris will hit.

Radar crews of the Space Control System of Soviet Air Defense Troops have been tracking the space station closely, the newspaper reported.

Leonid Gorshkov, chief of space-station design for the Soviet space research center in Moscow, said in January that the area in which the pieces of the station could fall are "somewhere between 51 degrees northern latitude and 51 degrees southern latitude."

The area described by Gorshkov includes the United States, southern Europe, South America, Africa, the Middle East, China, Japan and Australia, as well as vast stretches of ocean.

Krasnaya Zvezda said Saturday the possibility of the station hitting a populated area is 1 in 100,000.

Soviet officials have said the space station, launched in 1982 and powered by solar energy and chemical batteries, does not contain any nuclear fuel or other dangerous substances. 


 by CNB