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The Sun
10-05-2025
- Science
- The Sun
Out-of-control Soviet spacecraft CRASHES into Earth after getting stuck in orbit for 50 years on doomed Venus mission
A SOVIET-era spacecraft has crashed down to Earth more than half a century after its failed launch to Venus. The space vessel hurtled back down in an "uncontrolled reentry", the European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking confirmed. 2 The European Space Agency debris office agreed that the spacecraft had reentered - after it failed to appear over a German radar station. It's not yet clear where the speeding spaceship crash landed - or how much of it survived the fiery descent. Experts said ahead of time that the wreckage could arrive whole, given it was built to withstand a landing on Venus - the solar system's hottest planet. The hunk of space junk, called Kosmos 482 Descent Craft, was first launched in 1972 with the intention of it touching down on Earth's neighbouring planet. But this mission failed - and the probe has been stuck in low Earth orbit ever since. Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in space situational awareness at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands predicted the lander's return in a blog post. Scientists said there was a very slim chance of the machine smashing into people or buildings.
Metro
10-05-2025
- Science
- Metro
Out-of-control spacecraft set to crash into Earth today - where will it hit?
A Soviet satellite once bound for Venus is about to crash back down to earth after more than half a century in space. The Kosmos 482 Descent Craft has been floating around in outer space for more than 50 years, stuck in Earth's orbit. It's estimated the craft will descend through the atmosphere at some point between May 8 and 12 – and the potential area it could hit when it crash lands is huge. Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in space situational awareness at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands, has predicted its return and currently believes it will re-enter the atmosphere on Saturday, May 10 – though there is a 20-hour margin of error on either side of this. And due to the craft being a lander designed to survive passing through Venus's atmosphere, Marco predicts it could survive re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. Whether it survives the impact on Earth's surface remains to be seen – he warns the parachute system may not work after spending 53 years in orbit. Discussing the risks associated with the craft's re-entry, Marco said: 'The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero: with a mass of just under 500kg and 1metre (3ft) size, risks are somewhat similar to that of a meteorite impact. 'A re-entry analysis to ground level suggests an impact speed (after atmospheric deceleration) of about 65-70metres per second (150mph), assuming the re-entering lander did not break up or extensively ablate during re-entry.' The potential area where the Kosmos 482 Descent Craft could land back on Earth is absolutely huge. The craft is predicted to land anywhere between 52° north and 52° south – which covers the entirety of Africa, South America, Asia, Australia, and huge swathes of Europe and North America. However, the potential crash zone also includes huge swathes of ocean, meaning the odds of the craft hitting a populated area are very slim. The Kosmos 482 Descent Craft was launched on March 31, 1972, and soon after it broke into several pieces. The craft got stuck in an elliptical orbit around Earth due to a failure in the upper stage of the rocket that launched it into space in the first place. Its main body re-entered the atmosphere on May 5, 1981, and the rest of the craft has been orbiting the planet ever since. If you want to keep an eye on the Kosmos 482 Descent Craft, there's a live tracking website watching its movements. At the time of writing it was floating above the Crozet Islands, a small archipelago in the Indian Ocean, south east of the most southerly point of South Africa. There are roughly 35,000 pieces of space debris that are more than 10cm in size being tracked by experts at the moment, with about 10,000 active satellites in orbit. Objects caught in Earth's gravity undergo a process called orbital decay, which means they get closer and closer to the planet as time goes on until eventually falling back through the atmosphere. More Trending Most of the time, these pieces of debris either burn up in the atmosphere or, if they survive, land in the sea or unpopulated areas. According to the European Space Agency, about 160 large objects made uncontrolled re-entries in 2021. And the US Federal Aviation Administration warned in 2023 that by 2035, if satellite growth continues, there could be 28,000 objects re-entering the atmosphere each year – which could be expected to kill or injure someone every two years. Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@ For more stories like this, check our news page. MORE: Giant 'space umbrella' will orbit Earth but it won't stop the rain – here's why MORE: Controversial Russian satellite involved in nuclear row is 'spinning out of control' MORE: Rare 'smiley face' to light up sky when Venus, Saturn and the Moon align
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Failed Soviet spacecraft could crash to Earth this week — here's where it might hit (map)
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A failed Soviet spacecraft that was mistakenly trapped in Earth orbit more than 50 years ago is expected to finally crash back to our planet this week. Experts predict that the spacecraft, called the Kosmos 482 Descent Craft, will make its final, fiery plunge through the atmosphere sometime between May 8 and May 12, traveling at an estimated speed of 150 mph (242 km/h) as it careens through the sky like a meteor. Built to withstand a trip through the dense atmosphere of Venus, the 3-foot-wide (1 meter), 1,091 pound (495 kilograms) lander is likely to stay in one piece as it falls to Earth like a cosmic cannonball. But where will Kosmos 482 land, and are any major cities in its potential path? Unfortunately, at the moment, nobody knows for sure where Kosmos 482 will hit — and its potential landing area covers most of the planet. Given the satellite's current orbit, it could ultimately land anywhere between 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south latitude, Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in space situational awareness at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands who discovered the lander's imminent return, wrote in a blog post. Here's what that area looks like, shown in orange on the map below: The projected landing zone encompasses an enormous area on both sides of the equator. This broad swath includes the entire continental United States, all of South America, Africa and Australia, and most of Europe and Asia south of the Arctic Circle. (The Arctic Circle begins just above 66 degrees north latitude). Virtually every major city on Earth, from New York to London to Beijing, falls within this zone. That sounds bad — but you shouldn't worry: The odds of the runaway Kosmos spacecraft hitting any given populated area are exceptionally slim. With roughly 71% of our planet's surface covered in water, it is overwhelmingly likely that Kosmos 482 will land in the ocean, as most pieces of deorbited space debris do. Related: Doomed Soviet spacecraft tumbling toward Earth may already have its parachute out, new images hint The odds of the spacecraft falling directly onto your head are probably "the usual one-in-several-thousand chance" associated with falling space debris, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, wrote in a blog post. Experts won't be able to narrow down Kosmos 482's potential landing zone until it actually begins its descent through the atmosphere, which is currently predicted to happen on May 10, give or take a couple days. The Kosmos 482 probe was made and launched by the U.S.S.R. in 1972 as part of the Soviet Union's Venera program to explore Venus. The program achieved success with the Venera 7 and 8 probes, which were the first two spacecraft to successfully land on Venus in 1970 and 1972, respectively. Kosmos 482 was built as a sister probe to Venera 8. But due to a malfunction with the Soyuz rocket that lofted Kosmos 482 into space, the probe failed to achieve enough velocity to reach Venus, instead settling into an elliptical orbit around Earth. RELATED STORIES —How do tiny pieces of space junk cause incredible damage? —Space junk: How broken satellites are creating a garbage crisis in the sky —It's time to clean up space junk before orbits become 'unusable,' according to new ESA report Soon after its botched launch, Kosmos 482 broke into several pieces. The probe's main body reentered Earth's atmosphere on May 5, 1981, while the Descent Craft remained in its unintended orbit for almost 53 years — until now. Kosmos 482 is just one of more than 1.2 million pieces of space debris measuring larger than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) in size, and one of roughly 50,000 pieces of space junk measuring more than 4 inches (10 cm), according to a recent report from the European Space Agency (ESA). Orbital collisions and uncontrolled reentries are becoming increasingly common, with "intact satellites or rocket bodies … now re-entering the Earth atmosphere on average more than three times a day," according to the ESA report.
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
What to Know about Kosmos-482, the Soviet Spacecraft Crash-Landing on Earth
A defunct spacecraft from the former Soviet Union that has been stuck in space for more than half a century is, at last, about to come home. Kosmos-482 was launched on a voyage to Venus in March 1972 as part of the Soviet multimission Venera program. Thanks to a rocket malfunction, however, it never escaped Earth orbit. Most of its launch debris fell back to our planet's surface within a decade—but a half-ton, three-foot-wide, spherical 'descent craft' remained in a high elliptical orbit that looped from 124 miles to 6,000 miles in altitude. Ever since, it's been spiraling out of control back down to Earth, slowly losing altitude during its lower passes as it bleeds off momentum against the tenuous wisps of our planet's upper atmosphere. Sometime in the next few days (no one can say exactly when), over some part of our planet (no one can say exactly where), that doom spiral will end as Kosmos-482 dips down into lower, thicker air and begins a final, fiery plunge through the atmosphere. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] Such uncontrolled reentry events are relatively common and rarely merit much notice. Typically, in such cases, the spacecraft merely streaks across the sky as an artificial meteor as it breaks apart and burns to ash at high altitude. What makes Kosmos-482 different is that its descent craft was encased in a titanium heat shield so that it could endure a brutal atmospheric entry at Venus—and thus it has a very good chance of reaching Earth's surface more or less intact. 'Because it has a heat shield, it's likely to come down in one piece until it hits the ground,' says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, who closely monitors spaceflight activity and helped identify the stranded spacecraft's strange situation some 25 years ago. 'So you've got this half-ton thing falling out of the sky at a couple hundred miles an hour, which sounds scary. I mean, it's a bit like a small plane crash, right? That's not great.' The chances of anyone being killed or injured by Kosmos-482 are decidedly low. 'I'm not too worried,' says Marco Langbroek, a scientist at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands, who has spent years tracking the spacecraft's decaying orbit. 'There is a risk, but it is small—in the same ballpark as that of a meteorite fall.' Other troubling, recent reentry events have carried greater risks, Langbroek notes, such as falling debris from rockets launched by China and by the U.S.-based private company SpaceX. In February an upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket showered Poland with several chunks of debris. And in recent years large, deliberately jettisoned components of the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft have fallen on Australia, the U.S. and Canada. In several launches, worrisomely hefty debris also reached Earth from uncontrolled reentries of the core stage of China's Long March-5b heavy-lift rocket. And even the International Space Station shed debris that ended up falling on a house in Florida. While various claims of property damage and emotional distress have been made, so far none of these events has physically harmed anyone. In short, no one really knows. As of this writing, Langbroek forecasts that Kosmos-482's reentry will occur on May 10, shortly after 3:30 A.M. EDT. But this estimate, he notes, comes with a 14-hour fudge factor on either side. The closer the spacecraft gets to its point of no return (its first contact with sufficiently thick air to hit the brakes on its orbital velocity), the more certain the forecasts will become. Another recent estimate, from the private Aerospace Corporation, predicts a reentry a few hours earlier, albeit with an 18-hour uncertainty. One complicating factor in these predictions is the fluctuating puffiness of Earth's atmosphere, which can swell or shrink based on how much it's being battered by solar wind and other space weather events. Given its current orbit, the spacecraft's potential landing area encompasses most of Earth's surface between 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south latitude. This means it could make landfall anywhere in Africa or Australia, in most of North or South America, or in broad swaths of Asia or Europe. Or, most likely, it may instead splash down somewhere in the vastness of the global ocean that lies between those latitudes. All these uncertainties serve to compound the problem of forecasting Kosmos-482's exact impact point. Because the spacecraft will be moving at some 17,000 miles per hour whenever it begins to plow through thicker air and slow down, even a slight discrepancy in its predicted versus actual position at that point would result in a large change in its final destination on the spinning Earth below. Whether intact or fragmented, in the likely event that the Kosmos-482 descent craft reaches our planet's surface, it will be considered the property of Russia. 'Legally, as the successor to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation is responsible for the object—and any damage it might do,' Langbroek says. And because of its titanium shell, he expects that the spacecraft may only suffer slightly from its impact. 'Basically, what we have here is a time capsule with 53-year-old Soviet technology returning to Earth,' he says. 'If it could be recovered, this would be true 'space archaeology!' To quote Indiana Jones, 'It belongs in a museum!'' Assuming any material is recovered, however, international law dictates that the decision to study or display any of it would be Russia's to make. For Asif Siddiqi, a space historian at Fordham University, who is one of the world's foremost scholars of the Soviet space program, the return of Kosmos-482 is a literal 'object lesson' about the wealth of archaeological artifacts preserved in space. 'Low-Earth orbit is a kind of archive of the cold war space race,' he says. 'It's amazing how much stuff is out there waiting to either occasionally intrude upon our thoughts—or, if we're super ambitious, for us to retrieve to actually put in a museum.... There are all sorts of things—spy satellites, failed probes, used-up stages, secret weapons, who knows—silently orbiting the Earth, their batteries used up, film exposed, radios burnt out. And not all of it is benign: there are a whole bunch of abandoned nuclear reactors from the Soviet radar ocean reconnaissance satellites still orbiting the Earth. The people who designed and built all this stuff are mostly dead and gone. But their handiwork is out there.' Although each individual uncontrolled reentry event poses low risks, McDowell says, we must be cognizant of 'the continued rolling of the dice' that these events collectively represent. 'This is part of the environmental legacy of the cold war,' he says. 'There's all this rubbish left in space that's now, decades later, coming down. And this is simply what these long reentry timescales give us, right? Here we are, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and suddenly these things from the 1970s are knocking on our door for attention again.'
Time Magazine
07-05-2025
- Science
- Time Magazine
What to Know About The Soviet-Era Venus Spacecraft Plunging Back to Earth
Time was, the Soviet Union fairly owned Venus. From 1961 to 1983, the U.S.'s old space race rival launched 16 probes, Venera 1 through Venera 16, that either flew by, orbited, or landed on Venus—with three of them failing en route. It's been decades since the Russians bothered with Venus, but this week, an artifact from that long-ago space program may very well bother us: Sometime between May 9 and May 11, an 1,100-lb Venus spacecraft known as Kosmos 482, which has been stuck in Earth orbit since 1972, will come crashing back to the ground, potentially threatening anyone on Earth living between 52° North and 52° South of the equator—which covers the overwhelming share of us. Here's what you need to know. Kosmos 482 was originally intended to be known as Venera 9. It was launched on March 31, 1972, just four days after its sister probe, Venera 8. That ship had a brief but glorious life. It arrived at Venus on July 22, 1972, spent close to an hour descending through the atmosphere, and landed at 6:24 a.m. local Venus time. (Local time on another world is calculated the same way it is on Earth—by measuring the angle of the sun relative to the meridians, or lines of longitude.) Once on the ground, Venera 8 lived for only 63 minutes, which is about what was expected given Venus's hellish conditions. The atmospheric pressure is 93 times greater than it is on Earth, with a sea level pressure of 1,350 pounds per square inch (psi) compared to just 14.7 psi here. The air is mostly carbon dioxide, which, together with Venus's greater proximity to the sun, means an average temperature 860°F—or more than 200 degrees hotter than the melting point of lead. That was the future that awaited Venera 9 too, but things didn't work out for what turned out to be a snakebit ship. After reaching Earth orbit, it fired its engine to enter what is known as a Venus transfer trajectory; that engine burn went awry, however, either cutting off too soon or not reaching a sufficient thrust to send the spacecraft on its way. Instead, it remained in an elliptical Earth orbit, with an apogee, or high point, of 560 miles, and a perigee, or low point, of 130 miles. There it has remained for the past 53 years. For its pains, Venera 9 lost not only its mission but its name. Abiding by Soviet-era nomenclature rules, spacecraft that remain in orbit around the Earth are dubbed Kosmos, followed by a number—in this case, Kosmos 482. In 2022, Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archaeologist who toggled over to sky watching mid-career and now lectures on space situational awareness at The Netherlands' Delft Technical University, completed a round of tracking Kosmos 482's orbit. In The Space Review, he wrote that the object would reenter Earth's atmosphere sometime in 2025 or 2026, due to the steady accumulation of drag by the atmosphere's upper reaches. Further tracking of the spacecraft's trajectory— by Langbroek, NASA, and the nonprofit Aerospace Corporation —now predicts the reentry will occur on May 10, at 12:42 a.m., plus or minus 19 hours. 'The reentry is an uncontrolled reentry,' Langbroek wrote on his website on April 24. 'It likely will be a hard impact. I doubt the parachute deployment system will still work after 53 years and with dead batteries.' Ordinarily, even a spacecraft as big as Kosmos 482 would not pose much danger to people on the ground. The same atmospheric friction that causes most meteors to burn up before they reach the surface disposes of errant satellites the same way. It is mostly far larger objects, like the U.S.'s Skylab space station —which reentered in July, 1979, scattering debris across the Australian outback—that cause concern. But Kosmos 482 is different; it was intentionally designed to withstand Venus's pressure-cooker atmosphere, and even colliding with our own atmosphere at orbital speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, it could at least partly survive its plunge. 'The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero,' Langbroek writes. 'With a mass of just under 500 kg and 1-meter size, risks are somewhat similar to that of a meteorite impact.' All of the land masses in Earth's southern hemisphere are within the reentry footprint, along with the large majority of the north. Most of Russia, the U.K. the Balkans, Scandinavia, Canada, and Alaska are among the few places out of harm's way. Still, nobody is recommending calling the pets inside and crouching in fallout shelters. More than 70% of the Earth's surface is water, meaning a 70% chance of a splashdown as opposed to a hard landing. What's more, the landmasses in the reentry zone include largely unpopulated areas like the Sahara, Atacama, and Australian deserts. It would, of course, be best if Kosmos 482 disintegrates entirely on reentry, but space sentimentalists are hoping that at least a bit of it survives. Venera probes, like all of the Soviet spacecraft sent to the moon and the planets, carried along with them small memorial coins, medals and titanium pennants —embossed with the hammer and sickle, the likeness of Lenin, the Earth, and more. Kosmos 482 will return to a world very different from the one it left—with the Soviet Union itself consigned to history. This week, after more than half a century, a bit of commemorative metal just may survive the empire that sent it aloft.
