After more than five decades of its ill-fated launch, Russian spacecraft Kosmos 482 is finally making its way back to Earth. Originally launched on March 31, 1972, the spacecraft was scheduled to land on Venus as a part of the Venera program. But, due to a technical error in upper stage of the rocket that launched it, it failed to escape Escape’s gravity, and got stuck in low Earth orbit. Now, the spacecraft is expected to crash to Earth in the second week of May 2025. The current nominal forecast is re-entry on 10 May 2025, 19:05 UTC ± 1.5 days, according to the SatTrackCam Leiden Blog.
Should You Be Worried?
However, according to a spokesperson for the United States Space Force, the spacecraft is predicted to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on May 12. While the exact landing site of Kosmos 482 is still unknown, it’s unlikely to cause any harm, stated astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. “It is alarming, but not end-of-the-world alarming,” added Jonathan.
The malfunction in the upper stage of Soyuz rocket booster, left the craft without required velocity to reach Venus. As a result, the aircraft was left stranded in an elliptical orbit around Earth instead. After 53 years, a telescope analysis conducted by a space researcher and satellite watcher revealed that the descent module of the spacecraft is expected to make a fiery return to Earth’s atmosphere soon.
Marco Langbroek, a lecturer at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands, wrote in a blog post: “As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive re-entry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact.” He is the one who discovered the lander’s impending return. He further wrote about the possibility of risks due to the crash and added, “The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero.”
