Model of the Kosmos 482. This was originally set to go to Venus
Wikimedia Commons
More than 50 years after its release, a Soviet spaceship called the Cosmos 482 has returned to Earth. Originally intended to land on the surface of Venus, it began to fall apart in low Earth orbit, and never collapsed beyond it. After turning our planet in an oval orbit for decades, we are finally about to return to the ground.
Kosmos 482 was launched in 1972, but due to its secrets from the Cold War era, little is known about its structure or precise mission. We know it’s heading towards Venus because of other Soviet missions that were focused on our adjacent world at the time, and because it appeared that the spacecraft were about to fire in orbit there before it became fragments. The cause of the spacecraft’s failure is not exactly clear, but three of the four fragments fell in New Zealand shortly after its release.
The last fragment drifted into a higher orbit, about 210 km above the nearest point to Earth, the farthest, about 9,800 km away. Over the years, particles from the top of the Earth’s atmosphere slowed this work, shrinking the path around the Earth, and finally got close enough to fall. It is scheduled to drop on May 9th or 10th.
Its landing capsule, the rest of the spacecraft, is estimated to be over a meter wide with a mass of nearly 500 kilograms. Between its size and the possibility that it was designed to survive the trip through the hot, dense atmosphere of Venus, the descent can survive intact and hit the ground harder than 200 km/h.
It is impossible to predict where the final part of the Kosmos 482 will collide. Based on current orbit, it could collide anywhere on Earth between the latitudes of 52° south and 52° south, an area that covers everything from the southern tip of South America to parts of Canada and Russia. Thankfully, despite the huge range of possible landing sites, the chances of it hitting a settlement are low. “It’s an infinitely small number,” said Marsin Pilinsky of the University of Colorado Boulder University. statement. “It’s going to land in the ocean, which is very likely.”
Pilinski is part of a team that tracks debris. As it continues to approach, the chances of where you will land will be narrowed down. Space junk that falls on the earth like this is not uncommon. For one orbital object that NASA falls over every day, most of them burn out into the atmosphere or hit the ocean. The Kosmos 482 is a particularly large and durable space junk.
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