The Space Age past may come knocking on the world’s door next week as the defunct Soviet Union’s Kosmos 482 Venus lander from 1972 makes an unwelcome return home and is predicted to crash into the Earth’s atmosphere around May 10.
As part of the Cold War between the USSR and the United States, the Soviets pursued an aggressive lunar and deep space exploration program from 1959 until 1989, with mixed results. One facet of this effort was the launch of a series of Venera probes from 1961 to 1984. Despite a depressing number of failures, the program achieved some remarkable firsts, including the first probe to impact another planet, the first sampling of another planet’s atmosphere, and the first and, to this day, only landings on Venus.
Launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan, Kosmos 482 was supposed to be one of these Venus landers, but it failed on liftoff and broke up as it went into orbit around the Earth instead of heading for Venus. For this reason, the spacecraft kept the generic Kosmos name instead of Venera because the Kremlin didn’t like to draw attention to its failures.
The story should have ended there and would have if the SatTrackCam Leiden blog hadn’t taken an interest in Kosmos 482, first arguing in 2022 that the surviving fragment is the landing capsule and not the interplanetary transfer bus and, this year, noticing that the orbit of the spacecraft is decaying rapidly as it loses altitude.
According to the blog, the present rate of decay will have the capsule hitting the Earth’s atmosphere somewhere between 52° North and 52° South latitude on May 10, 2025 ± 2.8 days. This includes includes parts of the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada in the north to Argentina, Chile, and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans in the south. The margin of error is because of the many variables that need to be accounted for, the biggest one being how variations in the Sun’s activity can expand or contact that atmosphere.
Aside from being a bit of historical interest, this raises the question of, so what? Space debris burns up in the Earth’s atmosphere practically everyday. What’s one more 53-year-old piece of junk?
Us Department of Defense
The so what is that the landing capsule consists of instruments sealed inside a semi-globular titanium protective shell weighing a total of 1,091 lb (472 kg) that’s designed to withstand passage through the Venusian atmosphere, which is 90 times as dense as ours, and then survive on the surface of Venus for over an hour where it rains sulfuric acid and the temperature is that of molten lead.
In short, it’s a tough little basket and, if it doesn’t break up on reentry due to previous damage, it stands a very good chance of reaching the ground.
However, there isn’t much cause for alarm. If you’re in the Arctic or Antarctic, you’re out of the impact zone. If you’re in it, bear in mind that the Earth is three-fourths water and that a surprising amount of the land area is completely uninhabited or has a very small population density, so the odds of the capsule pranging on top of someone are extremely low.
In other words, unless you’re the sort who banks their retirement on winning the lottery, you can relax.
Source: SatTrackCam Leiden