The Cosmos 482 spacecraft has been orbiting the Earth for 53 years, but its journey is coming to an end. The failed mission to Venus is expected to re-enter the atmosphere in a dramatic fall to its home planet, where it may remain intact or scatter in an as-yet-unknown location on either side of the equator.
The Soviet-era spacecraft will plunge into the Earth’s atmosphere sometime between May 8 and May 12. Currently, the exact location of Cosmos 482’s impact on Earth is still unknown, but preliminary estimates suggest that it will cover a large part of the world on both sides of the equator. It is also unclear whether the spacecraft will remain intact or break apart during reentry, scattering into fragments.
Cosmos 482 was launched on March 31, 1972, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan. The mission was an attempt by the Soviet space program to reach Venus, but the vehicle failed to gain enough speed to enter the trajectory to the scorching hot planet. According to NASA, the malfunction caused the engine to burn out, which was not enough to reach Venus’ orbit. Since then, the spacecraft has been stuck in an elliptical orbit around the Earth. The spacecraft has now entered a higher orbit measuring 130 by 6,089 miles (210 by 9,800 kilometers).
Astrophotographer Ralf Vandebergh recently took pictures of Kosmos 482 in space ahead of its intended descent and captured what looked like a parachute deployed from the spacecraft. “Nothing is certain at this point,” Vandeberg told Gizmodo in an email. “In 2014, I noticed the first signs of this in my images, but I didn’t think seriously about the possibility. But when I processed the 2024 images taken 10 years later and saw the same thing, I thought I had to report this possibility.”
Even if the spacecraft’s deployed parachute had remained in space, it is unlikely that it would still be doing its job of slowing the fall of the cosmos to Earth.
Before reaching Venus, the spacecraft broke up into four different pieces, with two smaller fragments re-entering the atmosphere over Ashburton, New Zealand, two days after launch. The other two pieces are the carrier bus and the lander, which together form a spherical pressure vessel weighing more than 1,000 pounds (495 kilograms).
Today it is difficult to determine where the rest of the heat-resistant spacecraft will enter the Earth’s atmosphere. According to Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracking specialist based in Leiden, the Netherlands, its current orbit indicates that it should be somewhere between 52 degrees north latitude and 52 degrees south latitude. This barely narrows the impact zone, as it covers the United States, South America, Africa, and Australia, as well as most of Europe and Asia south of the Arctic Circle. The spacecraft’s landing zone will become clearer as it approaches its doomed reentry.
Another question is how well it will withstand the heat of reentry. “Because this lander was designed to pass through the atmosphere of Venus, it is possible that it will survive re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere unscathed,” Langbrook wrote in an updated blog post.
Langbrook suggests that the speed of the collision will be about 150 miles per hour (242 kilometers per hour), if the lander does not break apart or burn up during reentry. According to Langbrook, the kinetic energy of the collision is similar to that of a meteorite fragment 15 to 21 inches (40 to 55 centimeters) long.
Since our planet is mostly made up of water, the spacecraft will most likely end up at the bottom of the ocean. However, the probability that it will collide with a populated area is not zero, so this poses a certain risk, especially given that the date and place of its reentry remain uncertain.
