Soviet space explorer ‘Kosmos 482’ lands in the Indian Ocean

As previously predicted, the Soviet room ‘Kosmos 482’ returned to Earth on Saturday after fifty years. The probe landed in the Indian Ocean at the Indonesian island of Java, that reports The Russian space agency Roskosmos.

The probe was launched in 1972 from the former Soviet Union and was intended to land as a reconnaissance space ship on the Venus planet. It already went wrong at the start of the mission: the upper rocket staircase refused a service shortly after launch, so that the probe had been floating around the earth for half a century.

Space debris and meteorites regularly end up in the atmosphere, and usually burn completely before they reach the surface of the earth. The cosmos 482 is dressed in a protective titanium heat shield and was designed to withstand the toxic atmosphere and high temperature of Venus where it is 475 degrees Celsius.

« There is a good chance that the landing module will simply fall on earth. After all, it was designed to survive the descent in the Venus atmosphere, » Marco Langbroek, Satellite spotter and lecturer Space Situational Awareness predicted at TU Delft. In blog he predicted the landing time of the Soviet probe. The relatively small projectile of approximately one meter in diameter and a sloppy 500 kilos is not really dangerous, says Langbroek. It was most likely that the probe would land in the sea.

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