Debris from the 50 year-old probe Cosmos 482 crash-landed into the Indian Ocean over the weekend.
Cosmos 482’s mission was to land on the surface of Venus. Instead, it fell back to Earth more than a half-century after it launched. Credit: NASA/JPL
After failing to make it past Earth orbit on March 31, 1972, the remains of a Venus mission launched by the former Soviet Union circled our planet for years and was given the name Cosmos (or Kosmos) 482. While the rocket stage and other pieces returned to Earth weeks later, the lander itself made an uncontrolled landing in the Indian Ocean over the weekend.
According to a statement from the Russian space agency Roscosmos on Telegram, the craft was tracked to a region in the Indian Ocean, west of Jakarta, Indonesia, on Saturday, May 10 at 2:24 a.m. EDT (9:24 a.m. Moscow Standard Time). The European Space Agency (ESA) confirmed this after noticing that Cosmos 482 was not at its expected orbital position over Germany an hour later.
The USSR’s Venera (meaning “Venus” in Russian) program consisted of over 16 probes, landers, and orbiters from 1961 to 1983. The Venera 8 probe lifted off on March 27, 1972, and landed on Venus’ surface two years later, which was the goal. However, its companion mission that launched four days later was not so lucky. After the rocket carrying the probe attempted to boost itself into a Venus transfer trajectory, it separated into four pieces in Earth orbit. After the accident, it was given the name Cosmos — the title given to intentional and unintentional objects left in orbit by the USSR starting in 1961.
The 3-foot (1 meter) lander was designed to withstand the heat of reentry and descending through the hot venusian atmosphere. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has tracked the object for 25 years, said in an email Monday that he believes it would have survived plunging through Earth’s atmosphere, remaining intact until it made a crash landing at 200 mph (320 kph).
Even though the Russian government has jurisdiction over the object, it is unlikely to be recovered from the vast reaches of the ocean. So what will happen to the 53-year old probe now?
“What happens next is nothing. Since it didn’t land somewhere it could be retrieved, we just move on and wait for the next exciting thing falling from space,” explains McDowell.
The odds of being hit by a piece of space debris are small, but growing. If current practices continue, the probability of a death resulting somewhere in the world over the next decade from being struck by a reentering rocket body is on the order of 10 percent, according to a 2022 study published in Nature Astronomy.
