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A Soviet Spacecraft Is About to Crash Back to Earth After Being Stuck in Orbit for 53 Years - Smithsonian Magazine
The Cosmos 482 lander was intended to reach Venus, but it has instead been circling Earth since 1972In 1972, the Soviet Union’s Venera 8 spacecraft became the second ever to land on Venus. It operated for 50 minutes in the planet’s harsh environment before succumbing to the intense heat. But this intrepid lander once had a sister probe named Cosmos 482. It launched four days after Venera 8 but was unable to escape low-Earth orbit and broke apart.
While several pieces of the spacecraft burned up quickly, others remained in orbit. Now, 53 years later, one of them is about to return to our planet’s atmosphere—and potentially reach the surface.
“In the second week of May 2025, an unusual object will re-enter. It concerns the Cosmos 482 descent craft,” Marco Langbroek, an amateur satellite watcher and author of the SatTrackCam satellite tracking blog, writes in a post. “This object is the lander module from a 1972 failed Soviet Venera mission.”
It’s currently impossible to predict exactly when and where the re-entry will take place. According to modeling by Langbroek and his colleague Dominic Dirkx, the object will re-enter between the latitudes of 52 North and 52 South—that’s a large portion of the globe, spanning from as far north as England to as far south as the Falkland Islands off Argentina’s coast. The window for re-entry sits around May 10, depending on solar activity.
As reported by EarthSky’s Eddie Irizarry, when the sun’s activity intensifies, Earth’s upper atmosphere heats up and expands. This creates more atmospheric drag—or air friction—on low-orbiting objects, which slows them down and hastens their fall. Needless to say, the satellite will be making an uncontrolled re-entry.
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a-soviet-spacecraft-is-about-to-crash-back-to-earth-after-being-stuck-in-orbit-for-53-years-180986522/?utm_medium=distribution&utm_source=pushly&utm_campaign=editorial
Workers prepare Venera 4, a Soviet space probe, for its flight to Venus' atmosphere in 1967. Sovfoto / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
5 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I remember skylab in the Late 70’s was up for only 6 years, before it came crashing down into the Australian desert.
I don’t know what makes this spacecraft special. 
I recced that post, so I read it, but it must have slipped my mind. I actually visited the Space Exposition in Moscow at the Exposition for Economic Achievement in Moscow in 1986 (when I visited the USSR with my grandmother and her peace group) but I don't remember seeing this. It was kind of like a World's Fair, and this was one we chose to see. Of course, the display that sticks in my mind was Laika, the first dog in space. 
