A Soviet spacecraft launched in 1972 on a failed mission to Venus is believed to have crashed back to Earth early on Saturday morning.
The European Space Agency, which was monitoring the craft’s uncontrolled descent, said it was last spotted by radar over Germany. At the time of its expected crash, radar could no longer detect the Kosmos 482, concluding that “it is most likely that the reentry has already occurred.”
No injuries or damage have been reported.
The Kosmos 482 spacecraft was part of the USSR’s Venera program, a series of probes that were developed to research the planet Venus. Ten of those missions successfully landed on the hot, barren planet, but the rocket carrying Kosmos 482 malfunctioned. Its upper stage, which contained the descent craft, got stuck in Earth orbit.
Over the following 53 years, the approximately 3-foot-wide, 1,069-pound spacecraft circled the Earth in an ever-smaller elliptical orbit, until it came close enough to fall into the planet’s atmosphere.
It’s not unusual for space junk to fall back to Earth. More than 2,400 human-made objects fell from space in 2022, a record number, according to the ESA. The vast majority of them burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, and most of those that didn’t splashed into an ocean.
But Kosmos 482 was built to withstand a descent through Venus’ dense atmosphere, and to operate on the planet’s surface, where the mean temperature is 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 C). That meant it was theoretically hardy enough to survive a comparatively easy re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere.
There’s no record of space debris ever causing a human fatality. “The risk of any satellite reentry causing injury is extremely remote,” ESA officials wrote in a blog post about Kosmos 482. “The annual risk of an individual human being injured by space debris is under 1 in 100 billion. In comparison, a person is about 65,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning.”
On Friday, the U.S. Space Force forecast that the spacecraft would re-enter the atmosphere at 1:52 a.m. ET on Saturday morning above the Pacific Ocean, west of Guam.
