A SOVIET spacecraft once destined for Venus is expected to crash land on Earth this week after more than 50 years stuck in orbit.
The Cold War-era spacecraft, called the Kosmos 482 Descent Craft, is set to embark on a fiery descent through the atmosphere between 8 May and 12 May.
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The failed Venus probe has been stuck in low Earth orbit since its launch in 1972.
Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in space situational awareness at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands predicted the landers return in a blog post.
The spacecraft is expected to hit Earth at a staggering speed of 17,000mph – which Langbroek likened to a meteorite impact.
Soon after its botched launch, Kosmos 482 broke into several pieces.
The probe’s main body reentered Earth’s atmosphere on 5 May, 1981.
Though the Descent Craft has remained in orbit for almost 53 years, until now, when it appears to be breaking free.
It is just one of roughly 35,000 pieces of space debris, measuring more than 10cm in size, which are being tracked by experts.
At 3ft-wide and 495kg in weight, the lander is unlikely to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere on its descent.
Langbroek has mapped out where the hunk of space debris might land.
The projected landing zone covers an enormous area on both sides of the equator.
Kosmos 482 is expected to fall anywhere between latitude 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south – which puts London, alongside other major cities, from New York to Beijing, in possible danger.
Also in the red-zone are Australia, South America, and Africa, as well as parts of Europe, North America and Asia.
Nobody knows for sure where Kosmos 482 will hit.
What was Kosmos 482?
By Lydia Doye
KOSMOS 482 launched by a Soviet Molniya booster on March 31, 1972, as part of a mission to Venus.
The craft successfully made it into an Earth parking orbit, but Soviet scientists failed to launch the probe into its Venus trajectory causing it to break into four pieces.
Two of these chunks remained in a low-Earth orbit and fell onto New Zealand within two days.
The remainder of the craft is now expected to hurtle into the Earth in May at a staggering speed of 17,000mph.
It’s important to note the spacecraft has a significant amount of ocean to plunge safely into.
The odds of the rogue spacecraft hitting a populated area are exceptionally slim.
Most pieces of deorbited space debris land in the sea or unpopulated areas.
Russia’s space agency, Roscosmos, said probability that the fall will cause any damage is extremely small.
The Kosmos 482 was previously feared to hit the Earth back in 2019.
Video footage from October 2020 shows the failed spaceship plummeting out of orbit.
The startling footage shows the out-of-control craft hurtling through the sky – headed for Earth.
What is space debris?
Space debris is an umbrella term for any bit of junk, disused equipment and otherwise, that is currently stuck in Earth’s orbit.
And it has spiralled into a big problem since the dawn of the space age in the 1950s.
There are nearly 30,000 objects bigger than a softball hurtling a few hundred miles above Earth, ten times faster than a bullet.
It poses huge risks to satellites and the International Space Station (ISS), where crew occasionally have to maneuver out of the way of objects hurtling towards them.
In 2016, a fleck of paint managed to chip a window in the ISS because it was moving at such high speeds in Earth’s orbit.
The problem is, it’s not just a space issue – but Earth’s too.
Objects in space undergo a process called orbital decay, which means they orbit closer to Earth as time goes on.
Debris left in orbits below 600km normally fall back to Earth within several years.
While most space debris burns up on reentry to Earth’s atmosphere – there are some bits that don’t.
This is particularly the case with larger objects, like the EP-9 pallet.
A report by US watchdog, the Federal Aviation Authority, published last year warned that space debris that survived the fiery reentry could kill or injure someone on Earth every two years by 2035.