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Has Kosmos 482 Soviet spacecraft already crashed into Earth? Roscosmos says ‘It splashed down in…’
The Kosmos 482 spacecraft, a Soviet spacecraft that was launched in 1972 on a failed trip to Venus, fell back into Earth on Saturday morning.
The Kosmos 482 spacecraft, a Soviet spacecraft that was launched in 1972 on an unsuccessful trip to Venus, fell back into Earth on Saturday morning.
The Soviet Union's 482 millimeter Kosmos satellite is said to have fallen 560 kilometers west of Middle Andaman Island, Indian Ocean, west of Jakarta, Roscosmos said
Earlier, the European Space Agency, which was keeping an eye on the craft's uncontrollably falling trajectory, informed that radar last detected it above Germany. Radars stopped monitoring the Kosmos 482 at the time of its anticipated crash, indicating that “it is most likely that the reentry has already occurred,” NBC News reported.
There are no reports of damage or injuries so far.
Know about Kosmos 482 spacecraft
The Kosmos 482 spacecraft was a component of the Venera program, a set of probes designed to study the planet Venus for the USSR. Of those flights, ten made a successful landing on the scorching, desolate planet, while Kosmos 482's rocket failed. The lower stage, which held the descent ship, became trapped in Earth's orbit.
The 1,069-pound, about three-foot-wide spacecraft ringed the Earth in an ever narrower elliptical orbit over the next fifty-three years, eventually approaching the planet and plummeting into its atmosphere.
Kosmos 482 Soviet spacecraft: Are there any impact of space debris?
Space debris falling back to Earth is not uncommon. According to ESA, over 2,400 man-made items plummeted from orbit in 2022, setting a new record. While a few of them crashed into an ocean, the bulk of them burned up in Earth's atmosphere.
However, Kosmos 482 was designed to function on Venus's surface, where the average temperature is 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 C), and to survive a descent through the planet's thick atmosphere. This implied that it was sufficiently resilient in principle to withstand a relatively simple re-entry via the atmosphere of Earth.
There is no record of any individual being killed by space debris. In a blog post on Kosmos-482, ESA officials stated that “The risk of any satellite reentry causing injury is extremely remote.” “The annual risk of an individual human being injured by space debris is under 1 in 100 billion. In comparison, a person is about 65,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning.”
The US Space Force predicted Friday that the spacecraft would return to the atmosphere on Saturday morning around 1:52 a.m. ET over the Pacific Ocean, west of Guam.
