The fall of the old Soviet Venus Lander on earth will not be an ordinary room -Junk -Crash. Here is the reason

This will not fall ordinary space waste.

The failed cosmos 482 spaceship of the Soviet Union will crash to earth in orbit in the coming days after more than 50 years. His return cannot trigger the kind of artificial meteor shower that we have seen from falling rocket bodies and other ruins because Kosmos 482 was built differently: it is a Venus -Lander.

“Since it is a country that should survive the passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will be survived and intact through the intact earth atmosphere,” wrote the Dutch satellite tracker Marco Langbroek recently in a blog post.

“It will probably have a difficult effect: I doubt that the parachute deployment system will still work after 53 years and with dead batteries,” added Langbroek. “However, there are many uncertain factors whether the lander will enter again, including that this will be a long flat re -entry track and the age of the object.”

Kosmos 482 was part of the famous Venera program of the Soviet Union of Venus Exploration. The probe started in 1972 on the second planet of the sun, but never arrived there; His rocket suffered an anomaly that stood around the earth in an elliptical orbit.

The atmospheric drag has slowly but surely pulled the dead probe down over the decades, and the time of Kosmos 482 has almost increased. According to Langbroek, the latest forecasts will return to earth at around 4 a.m. (0800 GMT) on Saturday (May 10th). However, the uncertainty is quite high – plus or minus 20.6 hours.

The orbital inclination of Kosmos 482 is 52 degrees, so that the craft is re -entered between 52 degrees north width and 52 degrees south – a large percentage of the surface of the earth. In view of the large fault bars in timing, forecastics can not say much more at this time. (These fault bars are getting smaller and smaller, since Kosmos 482 becomes lower and lower and observers collect more data.)

However, the oceans cover about 70% of the surface of the earth, so that we can say one: it is likely that Kosmos 482 sprayed at sea.

Telescopic images of the Soviet Cosmos 482 Venus parentage craft in the earth orbit, recorded by the satellite tracker Ralf Vandeberg from the Netherlands, indicate that the self -parachute of the probe may no longer be able to be. (Photo credit: Ralf Vandeberg)

According to Langbroek, it is assumed that Kosmos 482 resembles Venera 8 Lander, which was also started in Venus in 1972 (but was actually safely done there). If this is the case, Kosmos 482 is about 1 meter wide and weighs about £ 1,190 (495 kilograms).

The modeling work suggests that Kosmos 482 hits the floor (or the waves) on the floor at 240 km / h, provided that, according to Langbroek, it does not break apart during the re -occurrence.

“The kinetic energy in the impact is similar to that of a 40-55 cm [16 to 22 inches] Big (after ablation) meteorite fragment, “he wrote.

But there is even less reason than usual to fear a “death from the above” scenario with Kosmos 482, since the robustness of the craft.

“Since it will probably reach the earth[‘s] The surface as just a single object, the risks involved are lower than, for example, those that were created by re -entry into the upper level of the upper level of Falcon 9 that seem in several meters in a large area, “wrote Langbroek.

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