It is believed that a Soviet spaceship be launched in 1972 on a failed Mission of Venus, fell back to Earth early Saturday morning.
The European space agency, which was monitoring the unconteed descent of the craft, said it was last seen by the radar over Germany. By the time of their expected accident, the radars could no longer detect Kosmos 482, concluding that “it is more likely that the reentry has already occurred.”
No injuries or damage were reported.
The Kosmos 482 Spacenate was part of the USSR Venera program, a series of probes that were designed to research the Planet Venus. Ten of these missions successfully landed on the hot and arid planet, but the rocket that carried Kosmos 482 worked badly. His upper stage, which contained the craft of descent, was trapped in the earth’s orbit.
In the following fifty -three years, the spacecraft of approximately three feet wide and 1,069 pounds circulated the earth in an increasing elliptical orbit, until it gets close enough to fall into the planet’s atmosphere.
It is not uncommon for space waste to fall back to the earth. More than 2,400 man -made objects fell from space by 2022, a record number, according to ESA. The vast majority of them burned in the atmosphere of the earth, and most of those who did not spread into an ocean.
But Kosmos 482 was built to support a descent by the dense atmosphere of Venus and to operate on the planet’s surface, where the average temperature is 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 ° C). This meant it was theoretically resistant enough to survive a comparatively easy reentry through the earth’s atmosphere.
There is no record of spatial debris causing a human fatality. “The risk of any satellite reentry causing injuries is extremely remote,” ESA officers wrote in a Kosmos-482 post. “The annual risk of an individual human being wounded by spatial debris is less than 1 in 100 billion. By comparison, one person has about 65,000 times more likely to be hit by lightning.”
On Friday, the US space force predicted that the space ship would enter the atmosphere again at 1:52 am on Saturday morning above the Pacific Ocean, west of Guam.