Was launched on March 27, 1972 and should have landed on the planet Venusbut after more than half a century the space debris Kosmos 482 – the twin probe of Venera 8enclosed in a protective titanium capsule – is about to carry out a uncontrolled return on the earth between the 9 and 12 May. The most probable moment is on the evening of May 10, with an uncertainty of 36 hours. We still do not know precisely neither the When nor the Where of the return: we will know more in the next few hours and in the next few days, as further observations of the object will be carried out. However, remember that, statistically, The chances of impact in an urbanized area are very low Since much of the earth’s surface is covered by the oceans or desert, therefore There is no need to worry For the moment.
Kosmos 482 – this is the generic name given since 1962 to Soviet spatial debris – and its twin probe were launched in 1972the golden era of the spatial exploration of the Soviet Union, when Venus was a goal with maximum priority. To date, the USSR was the only country to land probes on our planet “neighbor” in the sun system. The first time was with Venera 7 In the 1970which became the first human artifact to land on another planet and to communicate with the earth from its surface.
Given the complexity of the company, the Soviets They launched the Venusian probes in couplesso that if one had to fail there would have been the other of backup. It was preferred to organize the missions in this way also because the launch windows For Venus (i.e. the “good” time intervals for the departure of the missions) take place about every two years, and at that time of racing to the space, exploiting the times the timing was a great priority.
On March 27, 1972, the two VENERA 8 twin probes were ready on the launch platform of the cosmodrome of Bajkonurin the current Kazakhstan. The program provided that on March 31, the two probes were inserted in a “parking” orbit “around the Earth before heading to Venus through an appropriate push of the engines. Only one of the twins, however, would have reached Venuson July 22 of the same year, sending us data for just under an hour before the extreme conditions of the most “infernal” planet of the sun system made the probe unusable.
The other, perhaps for having given the push of exit from the parking orbit at the wrong time, He never managed to escape the terrestrial gravity And he broke into four parts. Two of these returned within a couple of days in New Zealandwhile the other two became space debris positioned in a very elongated orbit, which ranges from about 10,000 km of quota at approximately 200 km. Even if they are considerable heights, a few hundred kilometers of altitude the terrestrial atmosphere is not entirely absent, and this entails over the decades a certain amount of friction that has the effect of gradually lower the share of the satellite. At this point a “avalanche effect” intervenes: the more the satellite descends the more it meets a dense atmosphere that accelerates the descent process as long as the space debris begins to spiraling in an uncontrolled way towards our planet.
This is precisely what is currently happening in Kosmos 482: according to the calculations of the astronomers, around the May 10thwith an uncertainty of about 36 hoursthe two debris should arrive on the surface. Attention is focused mainly on one of these debris, which would have been the landing capsule of the mission, that is, the system that would then physically rest on the Venus surface.
Being an interplanetary landing system, was designed to resist a much more violent descent of what awaits him in the next few days. In other words: it is almost certain that the Lander – who weighs 495 kg – It will arrive on the earth’s surface. Since the orbit is inclined by 52 ° compared to the equator, The return will take place between the latitude 52 ° N and 52 ° S: a considerable portion of the earth’s surface!
At the moment, therefore, we know very little about when and where Kosmos 482 will land, but astronomers are carefully studying the movements of this object in the sky, and as they will collect more and more data The forecasts will be increasingly accurate.
