Radio contact re-established with Mir

Russian technicians are still working to understand why they lost contact with the orbiting space station, Mir, for about twenty hours on Monday and Tuesday.

The head of the Russian space control centre, Vladimir Solovyov, said it was a very serious failure.

It was unlike anything experienced during the station's fifteen years in space.

He said communications with Mir had failed because it suffered a sudden and unexplained loss of power.

The Russians say Mir's orbit remained constant throughout and there was no danger of the one-hundred-and-thirty-ton station suddenly falling to Earth. They plan to bring Mir's life to an end by crashing it into the Pacific Ocean at the end of February.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service