After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth

A 53-year-old Venus probe that failed to escape low Earth orbit is expected to make an uncontrolled reentry in the coming weeks. Built to withstand extreme heat, parts of the spacecraft could survive the descent and crash on Earth. The lander module from an old Soviet spacecraft is expected to reenter Earth’s atmosphere during the second week of May, according to Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracker based in Leiden, the Netherlands. “As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact,” Langbroek wrote in a blog update. “The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero.” Kosmos 482 launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome spaceport in Kazakhstan. The mission was an attempt by the Soviet space program to reach Venus, but it failed to gain enough velocity to enter a transfer trajectory toward the scorching-hot planet. A malfuncti ... Read full article.