An out-of-control spacecraft intended to reach Venus has instead crashed back down to Earth, and it might even have happened in England.
If you saw a fireball streaking down overnight, it might be a good time to inform the European Space Agency.
They, along with Nasa, Roscosmos and other organisations, have been tracking the course of Kosmos 482, which launched in 1972 and has been whirling around in our orbit ever since due a malfunction which meant it never reached its intended location.
The part of the craft we are worried about is the descent capsule, which was created to withstand intense heat in order to reach Venus, and also means it could be more likely to withstand reentry to Earth.
Nobody recorded it crashing down, so exactly what happened to it is still a mystery.
It did not appear on radar screens tracking it above Germany, so we know that it did finally come back down.
Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, said the spacecraft ‘ceased to exist, leaving orbit and falling into the Indian Ocean.’
They said they had been monitoring its descent via their automated warning system for hazardous situations in near-Earth space, and according to their calculations it reentered at 9.24am Moscow time, in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta in Indonesia, around 560km west of Middle Andaman Island.
Nasa also said they believed the craft had come down in the Indian Ocean.
‘Because the probe was designed to withstand entry into the Venus atmosphere, it is possible it survived reentry, but has landed in the ocean,’ they said.
However, these predictions are not exact.
The window of where it could have come down is wide, with a few minutes give or take on the orbit route meaning a very different landing site, due to the spacecraft travelling at such high speed.
The EU Space Surveillance and Tracking system showed a map of its potential landing route, including land areas marked in red which were under its trajectory – including southern England.
They said that based on analysis, as well as its ‘no shows during passes’, they believe that satellite ‘decayed within the last estimated re-entry window’.
The fact that nobody saw it coming down may indicate that it did indeed come down over the ocean, as it would have been much more likely to be observed above land.
The European Space Agency said: ‘We have not received so far any reports on visual direct observations of the final re-entry, or on any impacts on ground.’
The exact fate of the satellite may become clearer in the next few days.
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