Mir has the last laugh

More than a week after the Mir space station spectacularly splashed down in
the Pacific Ocean, reports are emerging that it might not have been such a clean
re-entry. Farmers in Dagestan, part of the Russian Federation, are considering
suing the Russian Aerospace Agency, claiming that falling debris scared sheep
and damaged a greenhouse. In northeast Australia, jet-black pieces of an
unidentified material were reported to have landed on the roof of a home on
Thursday last week. If the fragments prove to be from Mir, sizeable chunks of
the station must have survived in orbit for up to a…