The failed Soviet ship Kosmos 482, designed to land in Venus, has entered the earth’s atmosphere after 53 years giving tumbos around our planet. However, nobody knows where exactly has fallen.
Context. As a twin of the famous Venera 8 capsule, Kosmos 482 was intended for Venus, but was caught in an elliptical orbit around the earth due to a rocket failure that in 1972 promoted it to space.
Since then, atmospheric friction has gradually reduced its altitude, which has culminated today in its inevitable fall. Although the reentry was an expected event, the different space agencies and monitoring organisms handle varied predictions.
According to Russia. The Russian Space Agency Roscosmos published in Telegram that the Kosmos 482 probe had entered the dense layers of the atmosphere at 06:24 UTC on Saturday. He did it in the Indian Ocean, about 560 kilometers west of the island of Andamán del Medio. Or as some rushed to point out, west of the famous Sentinel Island of the North, that of the isolated indigenous people.
According to Europe. For its part, the Space Waste Office of the European Space Agency places the reentry between 06:04 UTC and 07:32 UTC. The ESA radars in Germany did not detect the probe after that time, so the reentry is confirmed, although no direct visual observations or ground impacts have been recorded.
The central prediction of ESA points at 06:16 UTC, which would place the reentry south of Turkmenistan, on the border with Iran and Agfanistan.
According to the United States. The United States space force published through its Space-Track system that the Kosmos 482 reentry had taken place between 05:20 and 05:44 UTC over the Pacific Ocean.
This prediction is not only not consistent with the reports of the ESA and Roscosmos, but it is invalidated by the detection of the ship over Germany at 06:04 UTC, according to the radar data of the ESA.
Where is the capsule. The Dutch Satellite tracker Marco Langbroek wrote that the estimation of Roscosmos that places the reentry at 06:24 UTC on the Indian Ocean is “reasonably coherent” with its own model, which gives a difference of just 15 minutes.
That it fell into the Indian Ocean, relatively far from any populated area and daylight, explains that we have not seen visual material from the reentry.
It could be floating. If the capsule survived the reentry, the surface of the Earth hit a speed of about 240 km/h, generating a kinetic energy comparable to that of a meteorite between 40 and 55 cm.
The particular thing about this reentry is the robustness of the Kosmos 482 capsule, designed to survive accelerations of up to 300 g and pressures of 100 atmospheres in Venus. Not only is it plausible that you have survived. The space historian Pavel Shubin believes that if he is intact, he could be found floating in the ocean.
Imagen | Marco Langbroek
In WorldOfSoftware | There is an old Soviet probe about to fall on earth. The disturbing thing is that it was designed to resist hell
