A spacecraft launched by the Soviet Union in 1972 is due to come crashing back into Earth's atmosphere around May 10 and nobody knows where it will land.
The Kosmos 482 mission launched the spacecraft toward Venus but an upper stage rocket booster malfunction left the spacecraft orbiting Earth instead.
Netherlands Delft Technical University space situational awareness lecturer Ma by Doug Cunningham
Washington DC (UPI) May 2, 2025
A spacecraft launched by the Soviet Union in 1972 is due to come crashing back into Earth's atmosphere around May 10 and nobody knows where it will land.
The Kosmos 482 mission launched the spacecraft toward Venus but an upper stage rocket booster malfunction left the spacecraft orbiting Earth instead.
Netherlands Delft Technical University space situational awareness lecturer Marco Langbroek discovered the spacecraft's return to Earth.
"As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact," Lanbroek wrote in a blog post.
He said the risks are not particularly high, but not zero and are similar to a meteorite impact.
Netherlands satellite tracker Ralf Vandeburgh said a set of images he obtained shows the Kosmos capsule in Earth orbit.
"We see a clear compact ball! This set is already fantastic, I think," Vandeburgh said.
He said the capsule may be tumbling and in some images it appears to have a weak elongated structure on one side, which could be a parachute that opened during the rocket booster failure.
While re-entry into Earth's atmosphere is predicted as soon as May 10, the actual re-entry could be a few days either side of that date.
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