Half-tonne piece of Soviet rocket due to crash back down to Earth

A car-sized piece of Soviet rocket is expected to come crashing back down to Earth soon, after 53 years in orbit.

“It’s a half-tonne thing falling out of the sky at a couple of hundred miles an hour. That’s going to hurt if it hits you,” said one astronomer to Sky News.

Cosmos 482 was destined to land on Venus after being launched from the USSR’s spaceport in what is now Kazakhstan in 1972.

Instead, the upper stage of the rocket, which was responsible for powering it out of orbit, failed.

“The upper stage didn’t work right and it left just the probe in orbit around the Earth,” said Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell.

Parts of the rocket re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in the 1980s but one chunk remained in orbit, which was thought to be debris left from the spacecraft.

“Years later, I went and looked at the data and went, ‘This debris […] stayed up a lot longer than the other stuff. It seems to be denser. It’s not behaving like debris,” said Mr McDowell.

“I realised that it was the Venus entry capsule from Cosmos 482, which has got a heat shield on it [strong enough] to survive the crushing force of Venus’s atmosphere.”

Now, the heat-protected capsule is on a collision path with Earth, with astronomer Marco Langbroek predicting it will hit around Saturday.

“It’s half a tonne. It’s about three feet across,” said Mr McDowell.

“As it smashes into the atmosphere, going at this enormous speed, the energy gets converted into heat [and] you get this fireball.”

By the time it hits the Earth, Mr McDowell says Cosmos 482 will be “going only a couple of hundred miles an hour”.

“But it’s still a half-tonne thing falling out of the sky at a couple of hundred miles an hour. That’s going to hurt if it hits you,” he said.

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Scientists can’t predict where it will hit, although they have narrowed it down to between 51 degrees north and 51 degrees south.

“If you’re a penguin, you’re probably fine,” said Mr McDowell. “But if you live anywhere from Chile to Scotland, you’re in the zone.”

Much of the surface is covered in ocean, however, and the lander is around the size of a car, so the chances of it hurting someone are low.

For Mr McDowell, Cosmos 482 is just an illustration of a bigger problem.

“It’s getting really crowded out there and we’re getting more and more dependent on satellites for our everyday lives,” he said.

“I think the time is coming when we’re really going to have to get more serious about cleaning up space junk.”