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A lump from a 53 - yr - old Soviet spacecraft contrive to land onVenusis set to cannonball back to Earth next weekend , and nobody knows where it might set ashore .
The Kosmos 482 investigation , made and launched by the U.S.S.R. in 1972 , was built as part of the Venera syllabus that collected information from Venus ’s hellish surface .
Where the craft will reenter remains unclear, but it will likely land in the ocean.
But a malfunction in the upper stagecoach of the Soyuz rocket booster unit that lofted the ship skywards scuppered its mission , leaving the craft without the required velocity to reach the satellite and rather marooning it in an elliptic arena around our own .
Now , a scope analytic thinking conduct by a space investigator and satellite watcher has revealed that the decline module of the neglect starship is due for an imminent ardent coming back to Earth — sometime around May 10 , give or take a few days .
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The Venera 8 probe, which was the second spacecraft to sucessfully land on Venus.
" 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 standard pressure intact , and impact intact,“Marco Langbroek , a lecturer in distance situational cognisance at Delft Technical University in the Netherlands who get wind the lander ’s impending return , drop a line in a blog post . " The risks involved are not particularly eminent , but not zero . "
Kosmos 482 was build up as a sis investigation to Venera 8 , which launched in July 1972 to become the 2d wiliness ( following Venera 7 ) to set down on Venus ’s scorching Earth’s surface . Once there , Venera 8 beamed data from Venus for just over 50 hour before being fried by the inhospitable satellite ’s blisteringly - hot atmospheric state .
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When the 1,091 hammer ( 495 kilograms ) , 3 - ft ( 1 time ) lander returns to Earth , Langbroek predicts that it will be travelling at roughly 150 miles per hour ( 242 km / h ) , so he likens the risk of its impact to that of ameteorite . As for where the doomed craft will land , Langbroek says it ’s still too early to tell .
" With an orbital leaning of 52 degrees , the Kosmos 482 Descent Craft could come down anywhere between 52 degrees north and 52 point Dixie latitude , " he wrotein an clause for The Space Review . " This includes much of south and mid - latitude Europe and Asia , as well as the Americas and the whole of Africa and Australia . Of course , the biggest chance are that it will land in one of the oceans , as the failed Phobos - Grunt Venus mission did on January 15 , 2011 . "
With satellite trackers stay to observe the spacecraft ’s tumble from orbit , a clear word picture of its uncontrolled reentry will emerge in the arrive sidereal day .
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