What to Know About Kosmos-482, a Soviet Spacecraft Returning to Earth After 53 Years

A Robotic Soviet spacecraft has been drifting in space for 53 years. He will return to Earth at the end of this week.

Kosmos-482 was launched in March 1972. If everything were fine, he would have landed on the surface of Venus and would become the ninth of the missions of Soviet veneras without grass to the planet. Instead, a rocket malfunction left it stranded in the orbit of the earth. Kosmos-482 has been slowly to our world since then.

“It is this artifact that it was bad to go to Vus 50 years ago and he lost and forgot for half a century,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer in the center of Astrophysics of Harvard & Smithsonian that maintains a public catalog of objects in space. “And now you will get its moment at the atmospheric entrance, although on the wrong planet.”

Undercover in a protective heat shield, the spacecraft, which weighs approximately 1,050 pounds, was designed to survive its dive through the toxic atmosphere of Venus. That means there is a good possibility that it survives its immersion through it, and could reach the surface at least partially intact.

Even so, the risk of any floor injury is low.

“I’m not worried, I don’t tell all my friends to go to the basement for this,” said Darren McNight, a senior technical member of Leoabs, a company that tracks the objects into orbit and monitors Kosmos-482 six times a day. “Usually, a week we have a large object re -enters the atmosphere where some remains on it will survive to the ground.”

When will Kosmos-482 return to Earth?

Estimates change daily, but re -entry predicted days are currently Friday or Saturday. The New York Times will provide updated estimates as they are reviewed.

A calculation of the window window window, a non -profit organization with federal support that tracks space waste, suggests 11:37 PM, Eastern time, on May 9, more or less 16 hours.

Marco Langbroek, a scientist and satellite tracker at the Technological University of Delft in the Netherlands that has tracked Cosmos-482 for years, puts the estimate at 3:51 AM EAStern on May 10, more or less approximately 20 hours.

Where will the country be?

No one knows. “And we will know until after the fact,” said Dr. McDowell.

This is because Kosmos-482 is precipitated by space to more than 17000 miles per hour, and it will be so fast until atmospheric friction pumps the brakes. Then, the time that is wrong in just half an hour, with bad hour, the spacecraft is restarted more than half a world of distance, in a different place.

What is known is that the orbit of Kosmos-482 places it between 52 degrees of north latitude and 52 degrees of southern latitude, which covers Africa, Australia, most of the Americas and much of the latitude of the south and middle Europe and Asia.

“There are three things that can happen when something comes back in: a splash, a deaf noise or an Ouch,” Dr. Ir. McNight said.

“A splash is really good,” he said, and can be very likely because much of the earth is covered with oceans. He said hope was to avoid “deaf noise” or “Ouch.”

Will the spacecraft survive the impact?

Assuming that Kosmos-482 survives the re-entry, and should, provided that its heat shield is intact, the spacecraft will go around 150 miles per hour, when they crash into it, Dr. Ir. Langbroek calculated. “I don’t think it is much later,” said Dr. McDowell. “Imagine putting your car on a wall at 150 miles per hour and seeing how much it is.”

Re-entry heat should make Cosmos-482 visible as a bright streak through the sky if its return occurs around an area populated at night.

If the spaces of the spacecraft survive and recover, legally belong to Russia.

“According to the law, if you find something, you have the obligation to return it,” said Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Center for Air Law and Space of the University of Mississippi. “Russia is considered the registered owner and, therefore, continues to have jurisdiction and control over the object.”

How do we know the identity of this object?

About 25 years ago, Dr. McDowell was going through the NORAD catalog of approximately 25,000 orbital objects and trying to set an identity in each. “Most of them, the answer is:” Well, this is a rocket exploded with something quite boring, “he recalls.

But one of them, Object 6073, was a bit strange. Throwed in 1972 from Kazakhstan, he ended up in a highly elliptical orbit, traveling between 124 and 6,000 miles of the earth.

As he studied his orbit and size, Dr. McDowell continued to be the terrifying Lander of Kosmos-482, not only a piece of debris of the failed launch. The conclusion was backed by multiple observations from the ground, as well as a recently declassified Soviet document.