An extinct spaceship of the Soviet era is returning to the uncontrolled land, but experts say there is little cause of alarm.
The half-toned vessel, known as Kosmos-482, was designed to land on Venus, but spent the last 53 years off the orbit of the earth because of a rocket malfunction. Now, the spacecraft should dive into the atmosphere in the coming days, with the last predictions predicting that the unstructured reentry will occur at some point on Saturday.
A huge piece of metal falling back to Earth may seem like a terrifying perspective, but old satellites have spent rocket pieces or other small pieces of space debris fall into the earth and comes the atmosphere almost daily, according to the European space agency (ESA).
In most cases, the spacecraft harmlessly burns in the atmosphere, with very few – if there are – parts surviving the burning journey. But even when some pieces resist the atmospheric reentry, it is very rare that they fell on Earth and cause damage, mainly because the oceans cover about 71% of the planet’s surface.
“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.”
ESA’s office of space debris is predicting that Kosmos-482 will begin to fall into the atmosphere on Saturday, around 4:26 am, with an estimated uncertainty of about 4.35 hours.
It is difficult to make accurate predictions when an untt controlled spaceship will fall back to the earth, because much of it depends on the atmospheric dynamics, the spatial climate, and the specific orbit specific orbit orbit – all complicated to model.
As the spacecraft approaches the reentry, the researchers will be able to refine these predictions, but it is still difficult to know exactly where the spacecraft will reach the landing.
NASA said the landing site may be “between 52 N and 52 s latitude,” a huge track that covers Africa, Australia, much of North America and South America and large parts of Europe and Asia.
Space force officials said its most recent predictions show that the Kosmos-482 entered the atmosphere over the Borneo Island in Malaysia, near the Indonesian border, while the ESA dirt track serves the landing site southern Australia, inside or around the Antarctic Ocean.
The Kosmos-482 was launched by the Soviet Union in 1972 on a mission to land on the surface of Venus. It was one of a series of missions for Venus, but this one was trapped in orbit around the earth after a rocket accident.
Most of the unfortunate mission debris has already fallen back to Earth decades ago, but it is the spherical and half-toned landing capsule that is expected to return to Earth this weekend.
Like the capsule, which measures about a half meter in diameter, was designed to operate in fire Venus, could survive the reentry by the Earth atmosphere, according to Marco Langbroek, a scientist at Delft University of Delft in the Netherlands, which accompanies Kosmos-482 and put the online updates.
“It is possible that surviving reentry through the atmosphere of the intact land and the intact impact,” Langbroek wrote in a post that was updated on Thursday. “It will probably be a difficult impact: I doubt the stop implementation system still works after 53 years and with dead batteries.”
Still, this does not mean that someone on land will be in immediate danger.
“The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero: with a mass of just less than 500 kg and size 1 meter, the risks are slightly similar to those of a meteorite impact,” he wrote.