Soviet Union's Cosmos 482 spacecraft expected to fall to Earth after 53 years

A wayward Soviet spacecraft, adrift for more than half a century, will fall to Earth on Friday or Saturday, astronomers said.

The craft, which came to be known as Cosmos 482, was Venus-bound when it launched March 31, 1972, from a Kazakhstan spaceport, according to a NASA history. But it never escaped Earth’s gravity, probably suffering a malfunction in an engine burn. Pieces of it were pulled back into the atmosphere within days. The lander probe, the piece that astronomers expect any day now, consists of 1,091 heat-shielded pounds of monitoring and transmitting equipment encapsulated in a spherical pressure vessel. After launch, it achieved an elliptical orbit that took it as far as 6,089 miles from the Earth and as close as 130. But the ellipse has been tightening ever since.

In 2002, NASA estimated that 9,000 metric tons of debris were orbiting the Earth, including 25,000 objects greater than 10 centimeters in length. Over the past 50 years, space debris has fallen to Earth at the rate of one piece per day.

“Spacecraft reenter all the time,” Stony Brook University astronomer Frederick Walter said in an interview. But this one is big and “designed to survive entry into Venus’ atmosphere … so the odds are good something will survive,” he said.

Astronomers say that Cosmos 482 — also known as Kosmos 482 — will hit Earth somewhere between latitude 52 north and 52 south, an area that includes the six inhabited continents, a vast swath of ocean and yes, Long Island, though the odds of that are “minuscule,” said Hofstra University astronomer Stephen Lawrence. The odds of somebody getting hit by any piece of falling space debris are even smaller — about 1 in 100 billion in a given year, according to the European Space Agency.

There are several reasons astronomers cannot predict when and where Cosmos 482 will hit, Lawrence said. “Objects orbit low Earth at 17,000 miles per hour. Uncertainty of 10 minutes corresponds to 10 minutes of travel time at 17,000 miles per hour. The amount of friction experienced in the outer atmosphere is dependent on the density of air, which is dependent on how much energy from the sun the Earth has absorbed in the last week, which depends on sun spot activity and solar flares.”

Whether someone on Earth can spot Cosmos 482 at reentry will depend on where the viewer is and the time of reentry, said Walter. “It will look like a meteor,” he said.

Cosmos’ condition, after land- or seafall, is also hard to predict. It was built to withstand Venusian conditions, at least for a few hours, with atmospheric pressure 90 times that of Earth’s and temperatures hot enough to melt lead, Walter said. On the other hand, the heat shield intended to ease atmospheric entry may no longer be intact and the batteries designed to deploy a parachute and float the contraption gently down onto the Venusian surface are almost certainly dead, meaning it will hit this planet at 200 to 500 miles per hour.

Ownership of Cosmos 482 probably devolved from the Soviet Union to Russia upon dissolution of that superpower, Lawrence said, though it is possible that other governments might be interested in recovery — not because of the archaic tech, but “you could study how degraded it became in a micro-meteor and high-radiation environment,” he said. “You’re studying the effects of the outer layer of Earth’s magnetosphere on satellite space probe technology.”