A SOVIET-era spacecraft has crashed down to Earth more than half a century after its failed launch to Venus.
The space vessel hurtled back down in an “uncontrolled reentry”, the European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking confirmed.
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The European Space Agency debris office agreed that the spacecraft had reentered – after it failed to appear over a German radar station.
It’s not yet clear where the speeding spaceship crash landed – or how much of it survived the fiery descent.
Experts said ahead of time that the wreckage could arrive whole, given it was built to withstand a landing on Venus – the solar system’s hottest planet.
The hunk of space junk, called Kosmos 482 Descent Craft, was first launched in 1972 with the intention of it touching down on Earth’s neighbouring planet.
But this mission failed – and the probe has been stuck in low Earth orbit ever since.
Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in space situational awareness at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands predicted the lander’s return in a blog post.
Scientists said there was a very slim chance of the machine smashing into people or buildings.
Soon after its botched launch, Kosmos 482 broke into several pieces.
Much of the spacecraft came tumbling back to Earth within a decade – with the main body returning to Earth’s atmosphere on May 5, 1981.
The round lander section, estimated to be a metre across, was the last bit still flying around space.
Although relatively small, the lump of metal weighed around half a tonne.
It is just one of roughly 35,000 pieces of man-made space debris measuring more than 10cm in size which are being tracked by experts.
Langbroek mapped out the possible crash zone for where the space craft could land – and it spans an enormous area either side of the equator.
The most likely result is that it splashed down into one of the oceans.
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