This Soviet Spacecraft Will Soon Crash-Land on Earth
A defunct spacecraft from the former Soviet Union that has been stuck in space for more than half a century is, at last, about to come home.
Kosmos-482 was launched on a voyage to Venus in March 1972 as part of the Soviet multimission Venera program. Thanks to a rocket malfunction, however, it never escaped Earth orbit. Most of its launch debris fell back to our planet's surface within a decade—but a half-ton, three-foot-wide, spherical 'descent craft' remained in a high elliptical orbit that looped from 124 miles to 6,000 miles in altitude. Ever since, it's been spiraling out of control back down to Earth, slowly losing altitude during its lower passes as it bleeds off momentum against the tenuous wisps of our planet's upper atmosphere.
Sometime in the next few days (no one can say exactly when), over some part of our planet (no one can say exactly where), that doom spiral will end as Kosmos-482 dips down into lower, thicker air and begins a final, fiery plunge through the atmosphere.
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Such uncontrolled reentry events are relatively common and rarely merit much notice. Typically, in such cases, the spacecraft merely streaks across the sky as an artificial meteor as it breaks apart and burns to ash at high altitude. What makes Kosmos-482 different is that its descent craft was encased in a titanium heat shield so that it could endure a brutal atmospheric entry at Venus—and thus it has a very good chance of reaching Earth's surface more or less intact.
'Because it has a heat shield, it's likely to come down in one piece until it hits the ground,' says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, who closely monitors spaceflight activity and helped identify the stranded spacecraft's strange situation some 25 years ago. 'So you've got this half-ton thing falling out of the sky at a couple hundred miles an hour, which sounds scary. I mean, it's a bit like a small plane crash, right? That's not great.'
Should We Worry about Kosmos-482?
The chances of anyone being killed or injured by Kosmos-482 are decidedly low.
'I'm not too worried,' says Marco Langbroek, a scientist at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands, who has spent years tracking the spacecraft's decaying orbit. 'There is a risk, but it is small—in the same ballpark as that of a meteorite fall.'
Other troubling, recent reentry events have carried greater risks, Langbroek notes, such as falling debris from rockets launched by China and by the U.S.-based private company SpaceX. In February an upper stage from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket showered Poland with several chunks of debris. And in recent years large, deliberately jettisoned components of the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft have fallen on Australia, the U.S. and Canada. In several launches, worrisomely hefty debris also reached Earth from uncontrolled reentries of the core stage of China's Long March-5b heavy-lift rocket. And even the International Space Station shed debris that ended up falling on a house in Florida.
While various claims of property damage and emotional distress have been made, so far none of these events has physically harmed anyone.
When and Where Will Kosmos-482 Fall?
In short, no one really knows.
As of this writing, Langbroek forecasts that Kosmos-482's reentry will occur on May 10, shortly after 3:30 A.M. EDT. But this estimate, he notes, comes with a 14-hour fudge factor on either side. The closer the spacecraft gets to its point of no return (its first contact with sufficiently thick air to hit the brakes on its orbital velocity), the more certain the forecasts will become. Another recent estimate, from the private Aerospace Corporation, predicts a reentry a few hours earlier, albeit with an 18-hour uncertainty. One complicating factor in these predictions is the fluctuating puffiness of Earth's atmosphere, which can swell or shrink based on how much it's being battered by solar wind and other space weather events.
Given its current orbit, the spacecraft's potential landing area encompasses most of Earth's surface between 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south latitude. This means it could make landfall anywhere in Africa or Australia, in most of North or South America, or in broad swaths of Asia or Europe. Or, most likely, it may instead splash down somewhere in the vastness of the global ocean that lies between those latitudes.
All these uncertainties serve to compound the problem of forecasting Kosmos-482's exact impact point. Because the spacecraft will be moving at some 17,000 miles per hour whenever it begins to plow through thicker air and slow down, even a slight discrepancy in its predicted versus actual position at that point would result in a large change in its final destination on the spinning Earth below.
What Happens Next?
Whether intact or fragmented, in the likely event that the Kosmos-482 descent craft reaches our planet's surface, it will be considered the property of Russia. 'Legally, as the successor to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation is responsible for the object—and any damage it might do,' Langbroek says. And because of its titanium shell, he expects that the spacecraft may only suffer slightly from its impact. 'Basically, what we have here is a time capsule with 53-year-old Soviet technology returning to Earth,' he says. 'If it could be recovered, this would be true 'space archaeology!' To quote Indiana Jones, 'It belongs in a museum!''
Assuming any material is recovered, however, international law dictates that the decision to study or display any of it would be Russia's to make.
For Asif Siddiqi, a space historian at Fordham University, who is one of the world's foremost scholars of the Soviet space program, the return of Kosmos-482 is a literal 'object lesson' about the wealth of archaeological artifacts preserved in space.
'Low-Earth orbit is a kind of archive of the cold war space race,' he says. 'It's amazing how much stuff is out there waiting to either occasionally intrude upon our thoughts—or, if we're super ambitious, for us to retrieve to actually put in a museum.... There are all sorts of things—spy satellites, failed probes, used-up stages, secret weapons, who knows—silently orbiting the Earth, their batteries used up, film exposed, radios burnt out. And not all of it is benign: there are a whole bunch of abandoned nuclear reactors from the Soviet radar ocean reconnaissance satellites still orbiting the Earth. The people who designed and built all this stuff are mostly dead and gone. But their handiwork is out there.'
Although each individual uncontrolled reentry event poses low risks, McDowell says, we must be cognizant of 'the continued rolling of the dice' that these events collectively represent. 'This is part of the environmental legacy of the cold war,' he says. 'There's all this rubbish left in space that's now, decades later, coming down. And this is simply what these long reentry timescales give us, right? Here we are, a quarter of the way through the 21st century, and suddenly these things from the 1970s are knocking on our door for attention again.'
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