53-Year-Old Soviet Spacecraft Will Plummet Back to Earth This Week

Gizmodo

06-05-2025

Kosmos 482 has been trapped in Earth's orbit for 53 years but its wandering journey is coming to an end. The failed Venus mission is expected to reenter through the atmosphere in a dramatic fall toward its home planet, where it may remain intact or scatter its bits across a still unknown location on either side of the equator.
The Soviet-era spacecraft will plunge through Earth's atmosphere sometime between May 8 to 12. As of now, the exact location of where Kosmos 482 will crash-land on Earth is still unknown, with a preliminary estimate that stretches across large parts of the world on either side of the equator. It's also unclear whether the spacecraft will remain in one piece or if it will break apart during reentry, raining down bits of debris.
Kosmos 482 launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in what is know Kazakhstan. The mission was an attempt by the Soviet space program to reach Venus, but it failed to gain enough velocity to enter a transfer trajectory toward the scorching hot planet. A malfunction resulted in an engine burn that wasn't sufficient to reach Venus' orbit, according to NASA. Since then, the spacecraft has been stuck in an elliptical orbit around Earth. The spacecraft entered a higher orbit measuring 130 by 6,089 miles (210 by 9,800 kilometers).
Astrophotographer Ralf Vandebergh recently captured images of Kosmos 482 in space ahead of its projected descent, and made a note of what appeared to be a parachute deployed from the spacecraft. 'At this point nothing is sure,' Vandebergh told Gizmodo in an email. 'In 2014 I had a first sign of this in my images but I didn't think seriously about this possibility. But when I processed the 2024 images taken 10 years later and saw the same thing, I thought I needed to report this possibility.'
#Cosmos482 Note about the parachute possibility. Although still speculation as mentioned before, technically the images are correct. There are no tracking issues, scope issues and I not expect a similar atmosperic effect in images taken 10 years apart, if that would be the case. pic.twitter.com/DiCMzqNY0Z
— Ralf Vandebergh (@ralfvandebergh) May 6, 2025
Even if the spacecraft's exposed parachute is hanging out in space, it's unlikely that it would still do its job of slowing down Kosmos' descent toward Earth.
After failing to reach Venus, the spacecraft broke apart into four different pieces, with two of the smaller fragments reentering over Ashburton, New Zealand, two days after its launch. The two remaining pieces are a carrier bus and a lander probe, which together form a spherical pressure vessel weighing more than 1,000 pounds (495 kilograms).
Today, it's hard to determine where the remainder of the heat-resistant spacecraft will reenter Earth's atmosphere. Its current orbit indicates it should be anywhere between latitude 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south, according to Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracker based in Leiden, the Netherlands. That barely narrows it down as this area includes the United States, South America, Africa and Australia, and most of Europe and Asia south of the Arctic Circle. The spacecraft's landing zone will become more clear as it approaches its doomed reentry.
Another question is how much of it will survive the heat of atmospheric reentry. 'As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact,' Langbroek wrote in a blog update.
Langbroek suggests an impact speed of around 150 miles per hour (242 kilometers per hour) if the lander does not break apart or largely burn up during reentry. The kinetic energy at impact is similar to that of a 15- to 21-inch-long (40- to 55-centimeter) meteorite fragment, according to Langbroek.
Since our planet is mostly made up of water, the spacecraft will likely end up at the bottom of an ocean floor. The chances of it impacting an inhabited area, however, are not zero so it does pose some form of risk especially as its reentry date and location remain uncertain.