The robotic Soviet spacecraft has been drifting into space for 53 years. I'll be back to Earth later this week.
The Kosmos-482 was released in March 1972. If everything went well, it landed on the swelling surface of Venus, becoming the ninth of the non-whitening Soviet Venella mission to Earth. Instead, the rocket malfunction left them in Earth's orbit. Kosmos-482 has been swirling slowly towards our world ever since.
“It's this artifact that was lost and forgotten for half a century, intended to go to Venus 50 years ago,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who maintains a public catalog of objects in the universe. “And now, although it's the wrong planet, you'll get that moment with an atmospheric entry.”
The spacecraft, covered in a protective heat shield, weighs around 1,050 pounds and is designed to survive its plunge through the toxic Venus atmosphere. This means that you will likely survive the dive through this and at least partially reach the surface.
Still, the risk of injury on the ground is low.
“I'm not worried – I'm not telling all my friends to go underground for this,” said Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at Leolabs, a company that tracks objects on orbit and monitors Cosmos 482 six times a day. “Usually once a week, we have a large object that reenters the Earth's atmosphere.
When will Kosmos-482 return to Earth?
The estimate changes daily, but the expected date for re-entry is currently Friday or Saturday. The New York Times will provide you with an updated quote when it is revised.
One calculation of the window by Aerospace Corporation is a federally supported nonprofit that tracks debris in space, suggesting a further 19 hours of negative on May 10 at 12:42am Eastern time.
Marco Langroek, a scientist and satellite tracker at Delft Institute of Technology in the Netherlands, who has tracked Cosmos-482 for many years, has placed estimates near 4:37am in the eastern part of the country on May 10th, with the exception of a plus or a day.
Where will you land?
No one knows. “And we don't know until after the fact,” Dr. McDowell said.
That's because the Kosmos-482 runs through space at over 17,000 mph, and the friction in the atmosphere travels quickly until it pumps the brakes. So, the wrong timing in 30 minutes means that the spacecraft re-enters more than half the world elsewhere.
What is known is that the orbit of the Cosmos 482 is located between 52°N and 52°S. It covers most of Africa, Australia, America, and much of Europe and Asia in the South and Midwest.
“There are three things that can happen when something goes back in: splash, story, or pain,” Dr. McKnight said.
“The splash is really good,” he said, and perhaps because much of the planet is covered in oceans. He said the hope is to avoid “shud” or “sigh.”
Will the spaceship survive the shock?
Assuming Kosmos-482 survived the re-entry, the spacecraft will be around 150 miles per hour, as long as its heat shield is unharmed. “I don't think there's much left after that,” Dr. McDowell said. “Put your car into the wall at 150 mph and imagine how much it is left.”
If you return in a more populated area at night due to the fever of re-entry, you should see Cosmos-482 like bright stripes passing through the sky.
If a portion of the spaceship survives and recovers, they legally belong to Russia.
“Under law, if we find something, we are obliged to return it,” said Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Aerospace Law Center at the University of Mississippi. “Russia is considered a registered owner and therefore continues to have jurisdiction and control the objects.”
How can I know the identity of this object?
About 25 years ago, Dr. McDowell had been looking through Norad's catalogue of around 25,000 orbital objects, trying to pin their identity to each one. “Most of them recall the answer is, 'Well, this is a rocket that exploded from something quite boring,'' he recalls.
But one of them, object 6073, was a bit strange. It was launched from Kazakhstan in 1972 and eventually traveled between 124 and 6,000 miles from Earth, taking a very oval orbit.
When he studied its trajectory and size, Dr. McDowell speculated that it must be a whimsical Cosmos-482 Lander, not just debris from the failed launch. The conclusion was supported by multiple observations from the ground and recently declassified Soviet documents.
