It is believed that a Soviet spacecraft launched in 1972 on a failed mission to Venus has crashed on Earth early on Saturday morning.
The European Space Agency, which was monitoring the uncontrolled descent of crafts, said it was last seen by radar on Germany. At the time of their expected accident, the radars could no longer detect Kosmos 482, concluding that “the re -entry has already occurred.”
No injuries or damage have been reported.
The Kosmos 482 spacecraft was part of the Urss Venera program, a series of probes that were developed to investigate the planet Venus. Ten of those missions landed successfully in the hot and sterile planet, but the rocket that Kosmos 482 carried did not work badly. His upper stage, which contained the descent ship, stuck in the orbit of the earth.
For the next fifty -three years, the spacecraft of approximately three feet wide and 1,069 pounds surrounded the earth in an increasingly small elliptical orbit, until it approached enough to fall into the planet’s atmosphere.
It is not unusual for space garbage to return to earth. According to ESA, more than 2,400 objects made by humans fell from space in 2022, a record number. The vast majority of them burned in the atmosphere of the earth, and most of those who did not splashed in an ocean.
But Kosmos 482 was built to support a descent through the dense atmosphere of Venus, and to operate on the planet’s surface, where the average temperature is 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 c). That meant that it was resistant enough as resistant enough to survive a relatively easy re -entry through the atmosphere of the earth.
There is no record of space debris that cause human fatality. “The risk of any satellite re-entry that causes injuries is extremely remote,” said ESA officials in a blog post on Kosmos-482. “The annual risk of an individual human being wounded by space rubble is less than 1 in 100 billion. In comparison, a person has approximately 65,000 times more likely to be beaten by lightning.”
On Friday, the space force of the United States predicted that the spacecraft would return to the atmosphere at 1:52 am et on Saturday morning on the Pacific Ocean, west of Guam.
