According to Roscosmos, a willful Soviet spacecraft called Kosmos-482, returned to Earth to enter its atmosphere at 9:24 a.m. Saturday, according to Roscosmos, a state company for the Russian space program.
Kosmos-482 is designed to land on the surface of Venus and may remain intact during its plunge. Roscosmos said it splashed down in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia.
Kosmos-482 was launched on March 31, 1972, but it was trapped in Earth's orbit after one of its rocket boosters was shut down prematurely. The spacecraft's return to Earth is a reminder of the Cold War competition, prompting science fiction-like Earth forces to project themselves into the solar system.
“It reminds us of the Soviet Union's adventures in space – we may be more adventurous in space,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who tracks objects in orbit. “It was a bittersweet moment in that sense.”
When the United States won the Moon game, the Soviet Union won the game through its Venera program and set its sights on Earth's twisted sister Venus.
From 1961 to 1984, the Soviets launched 29 spacecraft to the world shrouded next door. Many of these tasks failed, but more than a dozen tasks failed. The Venera spacecraft monitors Venus from orbit, collects atmospheric observations while gently descending through its toxic clouds, sc and studies soil samples and sends back the first, only pictures we get from the Earth's surface.
“Kosmos-482 reminds you that 50 years ago, the Soviet Union arrived at Venus. This was a physical artifact of the project at that time,” said Asif Siddiqi, a historian at Fordham University, who specializes in space and science activities in the Soviet era. “It’s a little weird and compelling to me about how the way it has continued to circle the earth in the past.”
Half a century later, as the state orchestrates back to the moon, waving its head towards Mars, Jupiter and various asteroids, the lonely Japanese space probe is the only vehicle orbiting Venus. Other proposed tasks face delays and uncertain futures.
Putting your boots on the moon during the space race is the biggest award – but other worlds in our solar system are calling. As the United States became more and more concerned about Mars, the Soviet Union turned its attention to the second rock of the sun.
“There were interest in Mars at the time, but Venus was an easier target,” said Cathleen Lewis, curator of the National Air & Space Museum’s International Space Program and Space Suit.
Nearly the same size as the Earth, Venus is often called its twins, although it is about the same as a rocky planet. It is hidden in the cloud of sulfuric acid in a dense atmosphere of carbon dioxide. Venus' surface is a casualty from the out-of-control greenhouse effect, a sultry surface of 870 degrees Fahrenheit, and is shattered about 90 times by atmospheric pressure and about 90 times more than the pressure of the earth.
“How do you build a journey that can be in the solar system for many months, enter the planet through a thick atmosphere, reach the ground instead of something that melts or is crushed and photographed?” asked Dr. Siddiqi. “Thinking about solving solutions in the 1960s was an incredible problem.”
The Soviets threw their hardware on Venus again and again. There was no template on how to do it at the time.
“You are actually inventing what you want to send to Venus,” Dr. Siddiqi said. “Now, if a country like Japan wants to send something to Venus, they have 50 years of textbooks and engineering manuals. In the 60s, you had nothing.”
Soviet Venera's plan was granted many Supreme Courts: the first probe to enter the atmosphere of another planet, the first spacecraft to safely land on another planet, the first to record the sound of alien landscapes.
KOSMOS-482 failure occurs in the middle of this schedule. Saturday’s reentry is not the first time Earth meets the expected Venus Rand.
On April 3, 1972, around 1 a.m. local time, a few days after falling into trouble, the town of Ashburton in New Zealand was visited by several 30-pound titanium balls, each of which was related to the size of the beach ball and marked with Cyrillian letters.
One person ended up in the carrot farm, which shocked the local citizens. The New Zealand Herald reported in 2002 that one of the areas “ends up in a police cell in Ashburton because no one knows what to do.”
Although Space Law stipulates that ownership of space items that crashed still exists in the country where it was launched, the Soviet Union did not claim ownership of the field at the time. The “Space Ball” was eventually sent back to the farmers who found them.
Despite the loss of Kosmos-482, the siblings launched a few days ago eventually landed on the Venus called the Venera 8. The spacecraft survived and transmitted data from the ground for 50 minutes. Two years later, when Venera 9 and 10 arrived – for the Soviet Union, building redundancy meant launching two things – they slowly descended from the clouds, touching the surface of the earth and laterally surround the image of a desolate, pale yellow world.
Venera plans to end with an ambitious Vega probe in the mid-1980s. These missions were launched in 1984, landers were placed on the Venus surface in 1985, and were flying by Halle's comet in 1986.
“The legacy of Venus exploration in the 1970s and 1980s was a Soviet pride,” said Dr. Lewis.
The Kosmos-482 re-entered, although unique for historical reasons, is not that rare. Today, countries and companies are pushing more hardware to orbit, with no shortage of objects falling from the sky.
“Reentry is very frequent now,” said Greg Henning, an engineer and space debris expert at Aerospace Corporation, a federally supported nonprofit that tracks subjects in orbit. “We see dozens of them every day. Most of the time they don't notice it.”
This is especially true at the current moment, when the sun is very active, as solar activity increases the Earth's atmosphere and increases the drag of orbital objects.
Some of these reentered light displays. They may be caused by controlled falls back to Earth, such as SpaceX's cargo and crew capsules. Others are accidental, such as SpaceX's Starship prototype failed to test. And others intentionally uncontrolled and potentially endanger the danger, just like China's long-term March 5B rocket boosters, if they re-enter the densely populated areas, it's enough to cause major problems.
However, in rare cases, objects like Kosmos-482 will return to Earth to record the first step in the space where humans enter Earth.
“There is an archive of a space race that still hovers around the earth. There were a lot of things in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s,” Dr. Siddiqi said. “Sometimes we think of this museum there because it fell on our heads.”
Jonathan Wolfe Contribution report.
