A dead Soviet space probe from 1972 is falling back to Earth
In 1972, the Soviet Union launched a pair of space probes destined for Venus. While the USSR's Venera 8 successfully reached its destination, a malfunctioning Soyuz rocket ensured its sibling Kosmos 482 craft never made it past Earth's orbit. The long-dead probe's remains have subsequently circled the planet for over 53 years—but according to a Dutch satellite tracker, its fiery (and uncontrolled) demise is finally on the horizon.
Marco Langbroek posted about the impending reentry to his blog SatTrackCam Leiden on April 24. Based on calculation models co-designed by space engineer Dominic Dirkx, Kosmos 482 is due to begin its descent on or around May 10. However, it's difficult to pinpoint where it might happen at the moment, thanks to the sun's ongoing active phase and its influence on atmospheric conditions.
That said, Langbroek believes Kosmos 482's orbital inclination of 51.7 degrees means it could reentry between the 52N and 52S latitudes (basically anywhere as far north as the United Kingdom and as far south as New Zealand). It will also achieve a velocity of around 150 miles per hour in the moments before impact.
'With a mass of just under 500 kg [1,102 pounds] and [its] 1-meter size, risks are similar to that of a meteorite impact,' explained Langbroek, although this likely isn't cause for much concern.
'The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero,' Langbroek added.
It's also possible that the Soviet space probe debris could burn up during atmospheric reentry, but that's not entirely a given thanks to the probe's original mission goals.
'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 said.
There's also an (extremely) small chance that Kosmos 482's landing parachute may somehow still deploy during its last moments.
'I wouldn't bet on that working now,' Langbroek cautioned. '[I] would assume that, if it survives reentry, it would come down hard.'
The satellite tracker and his colleagues plan to continue gathering data and observations during the final days of Kosmos 482 to better pinpoint a date, time, and region of reentry.
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Astronomy show accidentally reveals unseen structure in our solar system
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'I should know my data better, after years of working with it.' The existence of the Oort Cloud was first proposed in 1950 by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who imagined it as a shell of icy bodies swirling around the sun from up to 1.5 light-years away. The cloud is the most distant region in our solar system, stretching as much as halfway to the next star, according to NASA. It's composed of leftovers from the making of our solar system, which were scattered in every direction by the planets after they formed. That means many of the icy bodies in the Oort Cloud don't share the same orbital plane as the solar system itself but travel at various inclinations, which is why the Oort Cloud is pictured as a sphere. If one of those icy bodies gets flung inward toward the sun, the heat starts vaporizing some of the material in the body, creating a tail — and what we call a comet. 'Every now and again, some of these icy bodies come into the inner solar system, and we can see the orbit that they're on,' Faherty said. 'And they're on these really crazy, long orbits. It can take them millions of years to go around the sun. And when they come in, they help us understand how far away they may have come from.' The problem with trying to imagine what the Oort Cloud looks like is that scientists have never seen it, even though we are technically surrounded by it. That's because the bodies that make it up are small — fewer than 60 miles (97 kilometers) in diameter — and even though they potentially number in the trillions, they are far away, making observations with telescopes difficult. The spiral was hiding in Nesvorny's data because he had never thought of visualizing it three-dimensionally. 'I never looked at it in Cartesian coordinates — I didn't have a good reason to do so,' he said. 'But once you do that, it's obvious. It's there.' 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'Every now and again, some of these icy bodies come into the inner solar system, and we can see the orbit that they're on,' Faherty said. 'And they're on these really crazy, long orbits. It can take them millions of years to go around the sun. And when they come in, they help us understand how far away they may have come from.' The problem with trying to imagine what the Oort Cloud looks like is that scientists have never seen it, even though we are technically surrounded by it. That's because the bodies that make it up are small — fewer than 60 miles (97 kilometers) in diameter — and even though they potentially number in the trillions, they are far away, making observations with telescopes difficult. The spiral was hiding in Nesvorny's data because he had never thought of visualizing it three-dimensionally. 'I never looked at it in Cartesian coordinates — I didn't have a good reason to do so,' he said. 'But once you do that, it's obvious. It's there.' 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