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Kosmos 482 crashing to Earth within hours

The Soviet Union's failed Kosmos 482 (Cosmos 482) spacecraft is crashing to Earth within the next 40 hours, and the aerospace experts are closely monitoring its predicted path or ground track

Thursday May 8, 2025 9:54 PM, Science Desk

The Soviet Union's failed Kosmos 482 (Cosmos 482) spacecraft is crashing to Earth within the next 40 hours, and the aerospace experts are closely monitoring its predicted path or ground track.

Kosmos 482, originally bound for Venus was launched on March 31, 1972. The attempted Soviet Venus probe, however, failed to escape low Earth orbit and is now set to crash land on Earth any time in the next two days.

Currently, Kosmos 482 is circling the planet at an orbit of around 140 kilometres at its lowest and 260km at its highest.

This is rapidly dropping as the Russian Venus lander tumbles around the Earth, and experts predict the probe will soon hit the point of no return, according to ABC News.

Cosmos 482 Crash Date, Time

According to SatTrackCam Leiden,Cosmos 482 is expected to crash back to Earth sometime around early 9 to 10 May 2025.

Aerospace Corporation is more specific. It predicts the Kosmos 482 will land at 12:37 PM AEST on Saturday, May 10, 2025 with 16 hours leeway either side.

Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded space organisation in the US, has been using publicly available radar data supplied by the US Space Surveillance network to track the out-of-control probe.

Not the first crash

It is however not the first part of this Soviet Venus probe to come back to Earth. After achieving an Earth parking orbit, Kosmos 482 made an apparent attempt to launch into a Venus transfer trajectory.

It separated into four pieces, two of which remained in low Earth orbit and decayed within 48 hours into south New Zealand.

The first of these pieces or space debris, crashed outside Ashburton, New Zealand in April 1972 whereas the was discovered near Eiffelton, New Zealand, in 1978, according to The Space Review.

The remaining two pieces of Kosmos 482 in orbit are likely to reenter sometime in the second week of May 2025, on early 9 or 10 May - after more than 50 years in space.

While space junk and meteors routinely veer toward a crash-landing on Earth, most of the objects disintegrate as they’re torn apart due to friction and pressure as they hit Earth’s thick atmosphere while traveling thousands of miles per hour.

But if the Cosmos 482 object is indeed a Soviet reentry capsule, it would be equipped with a substantial heat shield, meaning it “might well survive Earth atmosphere entry and hit the ground", according to Dr. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

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