Originally, she had to land on Venus. Half a century later, a space probe designed during the Soviet era should finally fall like a boomerang on earth. With one small difference: the object, which should probably crash between May 7 and 13, 2025 anticipates NASA this Friday, May 2, falls in a completely uncontrolled manner.
Where, when, and in what state? So many questions that are currently animating a cloud of experts in space debris. Difficult, according to them, to respond precisely. It was already estimated, six years earlier, that the probe could crash in 2019, but it was not. And it is still too early to know in which terrestrial region this metal mass of half a-tonne could fall back and which part will survive its return to the atmosphere.
The Soviet Union had launched Cosmos 482 – its name – in 1972, as part of the Venera program, a series of missions in order to study Venus. However, he could never leave the terrestrial orbit due to a dysfunction of the upper floor of the carrier rocket, leaving important parts of the orbit probe around the earth.
The remaining part of the probe, which revolves around our planet on a very elliptical orbit for 53 years, gradually losing altitude, is relatively small. However, it is quite possible that the remaining piece, designed to withstand the atmosphere of Venus, which contains carbon dioxide, survives the entrance to that of the earth.
It all depends on the state of the thermal shield, supposed to protect the probe to prevent it from consuming its entry into the atmosphere, which could be defective after such a long orbital period. If it is not, “He will return intact”, According to Jonathan McDowell, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, quoted by the American agency Associated Press. “”And you will have a metal object of half a-tonne falling from the sky. ”
Dutch scientist Marco Langbroek plans that the defective machine will enter the atmosphere around May 10. He estimates that he will crash at a speed of 240 km/h, if he remains intact. For the time being, the object could enter the atmosphere almost anywhere between the 51st north and south parallel, in a large area included roughly between London and Cape Horn in South America.
As most of the planet is made up of water, “There is a good chance that it will end in an ocean”tempered Marco Langbroek, still with Associated Press. The risk that he really hit someone or something would be “Similar to that of a random drop in meteorite, as there are several per year. The risk of being struck by lightning in his lifetime is greater ”, Considère Marco Langbroek. “But you can’t exclude it completely.”
