A piece of a 53 -year -old Soviet spaceship designed to land Venus is settled on the cannonball on earth next weekend, and no one knows where he could land.
The Kosmos 482 probe, carried out and launched by the USSR in 1972, was built within the framework of the Venera program which collected data on the infernal surface of Venus.
But a dysfunction at the upper stage of the Soyuz rocket booster which launched the ship to the sky has dismissed its mission, leaving the profession without the speed required to reach the planet and would count it in an elliptical orbit around ours.
Now, an analysis of the telescope led by a space researcher and a satellite observer revealed that the descent module of the failed spacecraft is due to an imminent fiery return to earth – around May 10, give or take a few days.
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“As this is a theurus designed to survive a passage through the atmosphere of Venus, it is possible that this will survive the start of the land atmosphere intact and that the impact is intact,” Marco LangbroekLecturer in space awareness of the situation at the Delft Technical University in the Netherlands who discovered the imminent return of landing, Written in a blog article. “The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero.”
Kosmos 482 was built as a sister probe of Venera 8, which was launched in July 1972 to become the second profession (after Venera 7) to land on the torrid surface of Venus. Once there, Venera 8 radiated Venus data for a little over 50 minutes before being fried by the flourishing Huchée atmosphere of the inhospitable planet.
After its failed launch, Kosmos 482 broke into two parts composed of the main body and the landing. The old one reinstated the atmosphere of the earth nine years after its launch on May 5, 1981, while the descent profession remained trapped in a slowly decomposition orbit which has persisted for more than 50 years.
When the lancher of 1,091 pounds (495 kilograms) and 3 feet (1 meter) returns to earth, Langbroek plans that it will move to around 150 mph (242 km / h), so it compares the risk of its impact to that of a meteorite. As for the place where the condemned job will land, Langbroek says it is still too early to say.
“With an orbital inclination of 52 degrees, the Kosmos 482 descent profession could descend between 52 degrees to the north and 52 degrees of southern latitude,” he wrote In an article for the space review. “This includes a large part of Europe and South Asia and average latitude, as well as the Americas and the whole of Africa and Australia. Of course, the biggest chances are that it will land in one of the oceans, such as the failure of the Phobos-Grunt mission came on January 15, 2011.”
Satellite trackers continuing to observe the fall of the spacecraft of the orbit, a clearer image of its uncontrolled school year will emerge in the coming days.