The Cosmos 482 (aka Kosmos 482) Venera Venus lander, launched in 1972, is expected to (crash) land tonight .. on Earth, not Venus.
Here is the trajectory map of 6 orbits from Aerospace Corp. with some added annotations to help make sense of it. It shows 6 orbital tracks over 8 hours centered around the expected reentry time of 2:11 a.m. EDT. It will strike the ground along one of these tracks, but not between them. Reentry will most likely occur near the northern part of the orbit, near perigee.
There is no info on how far down the entry point the lander will strike earth, but given recent experience with SpaceX Starship RUDs, we can expect it to crash-land after a few 100 km.
Cosmos 482
Cosmos 482 (aka Kosmos 482) was a Soviet Union mission to Venus, launched on March 31,1972, which failed to escape low orbit. Since then, it has been in orbit around earth, slowly losing altitude.
The Venera landing module was built tough to descend into the extremely harsh and hostile atmosphere of Venus and to withstand 300 G’s of acceleration and 100 atmospheres of pressure. Consequently, the 495 kg, 1-meter wide, almost spherical shaped probe is less likely to break up during reentry and might strike earth at ~242 km/h.
Impact Speed
The impact speed of Cosmos 482 is estimated at ~242 km/h. It will slow down considerably after reentry due to atmospheric drag and reach a terminal speed of ~242 km/h.
From sattrackcam.blogspot.com/...
With a mass of just under 500 kg and 1-m size, a TUDAT reentry analysis suggests an impact speed (after atmospheric deceleration) of about 65-70 meter per sec (~242 km/h), assuming the reentering lander did not break up or extensively ablate during reentry.
The kinetic energy at impact is similar to that of a 40-55 cm large (after ablation) meteorite fragment.
Cosmos 482 Orbit
The graph below by Marco Langbroek shows the change in apogee and perigee over the past 1.5 years for the Kosmos 482 descent craft. Each swing by earth has resulted in a lowering of the orbit due to upper atmospheric drag. The change has accelerated over the past year as the spacecraft descends lower and lower into the upper atmosphere.
Notably apogee has been coming down steadily, but in the past few months, perigee has started to come down too. Mid May 9 (today), the object was in a 194 x 126 km orbit, with apogee coming down by 40 km/day and perigee by 8 km/day.
Tracking the Spacecraft
We can follow the orbit and track of the Cosmos 482 Venus landing craft on the web at https://www.n2yo.com/?s=6073
This is another good site with additional details — https://www.satcat.com/sats/6073
Epilogue
I am sure many of us wish for the spacecraft to descend on some oligarch or far-right leader’s head, but let’s hope it falls safely in the ocean or a forest area away from inhabited areas.
We also wish that the space industry spent more of its resources on technology to safely de-orbit such space junk.
Updates
According to EU Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU SST), the Cosmos-482 Descent Craft decayed within the last estimated re-entry window (06:04 UTC ±20 minutes). Exact location is not known, but it lies somewhere along the yellow or green lines in the map below.
Since ESA reported a radar sighting in Germany at 06:04 UTC, the reentry probably took place along the green line, post-perigee.
Roscosmos wrote — "According to calculations by specialists from TsNIIMash (part of Roscosmos), the spacecraft entered the dense layers of the atmosphere at 9:24 Moscow time (06:24 UTC), 560 km west of Middle Andaman Island, and fell into the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta."
The map below is from an article in the NY Times this morning.
RIP Kosmos 482.
