Kosmos 482: Return Of The Prodigal Probe After 53 Years
The Soviet spacecraft Kosmos 482, launched in 1972 to land on Venus, is expected to make an uncontrolled re-entry to Earth in May 2025. Experts say the risk is low, but its fall marks a dramatic end to a Cold War mission that never left orbit.
A relic from the Cold War space race, Kosmos 482 — a Soviet spacecraft launched in 1972 with Venus in its sights — is now on course to return to Earth in rather less dignified fashion. After over five decades of orbiting the planet like a ghost ship in the sky, the spacecraft is expected to make an uncontrolled re-entry within the next fortnight.
Experts suggest the battered spacecraft could come a cropper around 10 May, but where it might land is anyone’s guess. It could end up splashing down in the drink, or — far less fortunately — dropping like a stone onto solid ground.
Originally intended to survive the fiery descent through Venus’s punishing atmosphere, the spacecraft’s landing capsule was built like a tank — about 1 metre in diameter and weighing in at nearly 500kg. It was meant to conduct surface studies on Venus, but things went pear-shaped shortly after launch when the upper stage of the rocket misfired, leaving the craft stuck in Earth orbit.
Most of the probe disintegrated and fell to Earth within a decade, but the capsule has stuck it out, whizzing around the Earth in an increasingly elliptical orbit — a quiet Cold War survivor, slowly but surely being dragged back by gravity.
“It’s likely to re-enter the atmosphere at a speed of around 150mph,” said Marco Langbroek, a Dutch space debris expert at Delft University of Technology. “While that might sound alarming, the odds of it landing on anyone’s head are vanishingly small. Frankly, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning on a sunny day.”
But that’s not to say it’s entirely harmless. If the heat shield still holds — and that’s a big ‘if’ after 53 years in orbit — then a half-tonne of reinforced Soviet engineering could fall out of the sky like a tonne of bricks.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, noted that if the heat shield fails, the craft will go up in flames, solving the problem neatly. “But if the shield holds, then we’ve got a solid lump of metal coming down somewhere between 51.7 degrees north and south latitude — which covers everywhere from London to South America’s Cape Horn.”
The chances of it crashing into a populated area are slim, given that most of the Earth is ocean. Still, experts are keeping a weather eye on its descent, mindful of previous incidents. In 2022, a Chinese rocket booster re-entered Earth’s atmosphere in a similarly uncontrolled manner. And in 2018, China’s Tiangong-1 space station came tumbling down over the South Pacific, narrowly avoiding catastrophe.
As with all things in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down eventually. Kosmos 482’s impending fall is a reminder that our spacefaring past is still with us — sometimes quite literally hanging over our heads.
So, while there’s no need to lose sleep over it, keep your fingers crossed it lands in the sea, rather than making a dog’s breakfast of someone’s back garden.
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