[9] By this stage Mir was well past the end of its design life,[10] and Roscosmos General Director Yuri Koptev believed that "any of its systems could well fail at any time".

[8] Therefore, it was decided to deorbit it while it was still functioning rather than risk it falling back to Earth out of control, like Skylab in 1979[11] and Salyut 7 in 1991, potentially dropping debris over a populated area.

[citation needed] Two out of three Progress M1-5 propulsion firings, at approximately 90 minute intervals, were used to bring the perigee of Mir down to an altitude of 160 kilometres (99 mi) above the Earth's surface.

[13][self-published source] A tough contact with the atmosphere occurred at 100 kilometres (62 mi) altitude, when some of the external light elements of Mir were torn off due to the rush through the rarefied air.

[13][self-published source] At about that time, the orbital complex broke apart and several of Mir's elements, surrounded by the plasma, were visible from Fiji against the evening sky.

[14] The European Space Agency, German Federal Ministry of Defence and NASA also assisted with tracking Mir during its final orbit and reentry.

[15][16] At the time, Mir was the largest spacecraft ever to reenter the Earth's atmosphere, and there were concerns that sizeable pieces of debris, particularly from the docking assemblies, gyrodynes and external structure, could survive reentry.