MOSCOW (Reuters) - The crew of Russia's Mir space station have fitted and tested all the equipment necessary for them to leave the craft in late August at the end of what is likely to be its final mission, Mission Control said Friday.
Among other systems, they installed and tested a vital back-up navigation system designed to keep the unmanned station from crashing down to Earth prematurely in case there is a malfunction in the main onboard computer.
The back-up system can be controlled from the ground and is much more simple and reliable than the existing glitch-prone computer, which failed last week but was restored to operation Wednesday.
The back-up system does not have to keep Mir's solar panels exactly facing the sun, since the empty station requires only a fraction of the energy it needs now to run life-support systems.
Russia, whose space program is suffering from lack of funding, has said it may send a new crew to the 14-year-old station if it finds more money, but will probably steer it into a crash landing in the Pacific Ocean in early 2000.
Russia is now using its Mir experience to build key components of a $60 billion new international space station. The United States wants Moscow to abandon Mir to focus its resources on the new project.
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