Between Friday 9 and Sunday 11 May the return to the land of very particular space object is expected: we are talking about Kosmos 482, code name of an old Soviet probe launched for Venus in 1972, but was blocked in the terrestrial orbit in the last 50 years due to a malfunction.
The most recent forecasts indicate that the probe lander is now ready to return to the Earth’s atmosphere. An uncontrolled return to which it could survive intact being designed to cross the Venusian atmosphere, much more thick than the terrestrial one.
The story of Kosmos 482 is lost in the archives of the Soviet spatial program, never completely desecretated. However, the available documents would indicate that it is the Venra 72 probe, launched together with a twin appliance at the end of March 1972 to study the atmosphere of Venus and bring a Lander to land on the surface of the planet. Like many Soviet spatial missions of the time, Venera 72 was organized in two phases: the take -off from the ground that was to park the probe in the low terrestrial orbit, and then a second launch, which should have pushed the spaceship in the direction of Venus.
However, something did not work properly during this second phase, leaving two parts of the probe (the lander and the rocket engine) in an extremely elliptical orbit around our planet. The protocol of the Soviet spatial program provided that all the probes that remained in terrestrial orbit, also due to accidents, took the name Kosmos, and thus Venus 72 was renamed Kosmos 482, abandoned in space and substantially forgotten.
In recent years, however, it has attracted the attention of several groups of astronomers who deal with tracing the orbits of satellites and space debris that travel near our planet. The Lander in fact began to get closer to an orbit of return: for about a year and a half apogee (maximum distance from the earth) and Perigeo (minimal distance from the earth) continue to decrease at a tight pace, indicating that the return is now close.
The most recent estimates speak of an entry into the atmosphere on the evening of 10, or in the early hours of 11 May. Regarding risks, however, it is impossible to make accurate predictions. Having spent 50 years in space, the Lander may be damaged to the point of not resisting the friction with our atmosphere. If it were still intact, however, being designed to enter (even if with the help of a parachute) within the atmosphere of Venus, it is not impossible that it survives at least in part at the entrance to ours, and then it comes to crash to the ground.
As always in these cases, the dangers for things and people are minimal, because the uninhabited or sea open areas in the return trajectory are many. If it were to hit an urban area, however, it could cause serious damage: the Lander has a diameter of about one meter, weighs 500 kilos and should reach the ground with a speed of about 65-70 meters per second. Enough to produce a small crater at the impact point.
