A spacecraft once launched by the now-dissolved Soviet Union is anticipated to make an uncontrolled crash landing on Earth this month, but space debris-tracking experts say it’s too soon to find out exactly where the landing spot might be or if it poses any risks.
The craft, called Kosmos 482, was launched in 1972 with the intended destination of Venus. Nevertheless, a rocket malfunction kept the probe within Earth’s orbit and it’s been stuck there, steadily decaying for greater than 50 years.
Dutch scientist Marco Langbroek, with Delft University of Technology, told The Associated Press that while the mass of metal weighs about half a ton, it’s relatively small.
There’s a probability it should break up on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, but even when it doesn’t, “the danger is analogous to that of a random meteorite fall, several of which occur annually. You run an even bigger risk of getting hit by lightning in your lifetime,” Langbroek said.
The possibility of the spacecraft hitting someone or something “can’t be completely excluded.”
Langbroek told Space.com that he pegs the current forecast for its re-entry for May 10, plus or minus a few days on either side. He estimates that Kosmos 482 will land with an impact velocity of roughly 242 km/h.
After the craft was originally launched, most of it returned to Earth inside a decade. Researchers imagine the landing capsule — a spherical object about one metre in diameter — has been circling the world in a highly elliptical orbit for the past 53 years, steadily dropping in altitude.
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Within the Seventies, the very best point of the orbit was almost 10,000 kilometres above Earth’s surface, but now it’s below 400 kilometres and rapidly dropping.
There are concerns that after greater than half a century in orbit, each the warmth shield and parachute could also be compromised or out of order.
A failure in the warmth shield could be preferable, Jonathan McDowell with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told AP in an email, explaining that the spacecraft would burn up in its dive through the atmosphere.
If the warmth shield holds, he said, “it’ll re-enter intact and you may have a half-ton metal object falling from the sky.”
The spacecraft could re-enter anywhere between 51.7 degrees north and south latitude — as far north as Edmonton, Alta., and just about all the way in which right down to South America’s Cape Horn. But since a lot of the planet is water, “likelihood is good it should indeed find yourself in some ocean,” Langbroek said.
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