{"id":294194,"date":"2025-04-30T13:41:35","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T13:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/30\/half-tonne-piece-of-soviet-rocket-to-crash-back-down-to-earth-in-coming-days\/"},"modified":"2025-04-30T13:41:35","modified_gmt":"2025-04-30T13:41:35","slug":"half-tonne-piece-of-soviet-rocket-to-crash-back-down-to-earth-in-coming-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2025\/04\/30\/half-tonne-piece-of-soviet-rocket-to-crash-back-down-to-earth-in-coming-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Half-tonne piece of Soviet rocket to crash back down to Earth in coming days"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Half-tonne<\/div>


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A car-sized piece of Soviet rocket is expected to come crashing back down to Earth in the coming days, after 53 years in orbit.\u00a0<\/p>\n

“It’s a half-tonne thing falling out of the sky at a couple of hundred miles an hour. That’s going to hurt if it hits you,” said one astronomer to Sky News.<\/p>\n

Cosmos 482 was destined to land on Venus after being launched from the USSR’s spaceport in what is now Kazakhstan in 1972.<\/p>\n

Instead, the upper stage of the rocket, which was responsible for powering it out of orbit, failed.<\/p>\n

“The upper stage didn’t work right and it left just the probe in orbit around the Earth,” said Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell.<\/p>\n

Parts of the rocket re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere in the 1980s but one chunk remained in orbit, which was thought to be debris left from the spacecraft.<\/p>\n

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Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player<\/p>\n

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\n 2:05<\/span>
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Is there life beyond our planet?<\/span>
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“Years later, I went and looked at the data and went, ‘This debris […] stayed up a lot longer than the other stuff. It seems to be denser. It’s not behaving like debris,” said Mr McDowell.<\/p>\n

“I realised that it was the Venus entry capsule from Cosmos 482, which has got a heat shield on it [strong enough] to survive the crushing force of Venus’s atmosphere.”<\/p>\n

Now, the heat-protected capsule is on a collision path with Earth, with astronomer Marco Langbroek predicting it will hit around 10 May.<\/p>\n

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\n \"China
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How a Chinese space launch felt from the ground<\/span>
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“It’s half a tonne. It’s about three feet across,” said Mr McDowell.<\/p>\n

“As it smashes into the atmosphere, going at this enormous speed, the energy gets converted into heat [and] you get this fireball.”<\/p>\n

By the time it hits the Earth, Mr McDowell says Cosmos 482 will be “going only a couple of hundred miles an hour”.<\/p>\n

“But it’s still a half-tonne thing falling out of the sky at a couple of hundred miles an hour. That’s going to hurt if it hits you,” he said.<\/p>\n

Read more from Sky News:<\/strong>
Ransacked and looted: Sky reporter returns to family home<\/strong><\/a>
Trump celebrates 100 days in office<\/strong><\/a>
Sixteen-year-old detained after three people killed in Sweden<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Scientists can’t predict where it will hit, although they have narrowed it down to between 51 degrees north and 51 degrees south.<\/p>\n

“If you’re a penguin, you’re probably fine,” said Mr McDowell. “But if you live anywhere from Chile to Scotland, you’re in the zone.”<\/p>\n

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\n \"Blue
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Katy Perry’s journey into space<\/span>
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Much of the surface is covered in ocean, however, and the lander is around the size of a car, so the chances of it hurting someone are low.<\/p>\n

For Mr McDowell, Cosmos 482 is just an illustration of a bigger problem.<\/p>\n

“It’s getting really crowded out there and we’re getting more and more dependent on satellites for our everyday lives,” he said.<\/p>\n

“I think the time is coming when we’re really going to have to get more serious about cleaning up space junk.”<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n


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Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A car-sized piece of Soviet rocket is expected to come crashing back down to Earth in the coming days, after 53 years in orbit.\u00a0 “It’s a half-tonne thing falling out of the sky at a couple of hundred miles an hour. That’s going to hurt if it hits you,” said one astronomer to Sky News. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":294195,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/e3.365dm.com\/25\/04\/768x432\/skynews-thomas-moore-space_6889359.jpg?20250417200720","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[607],"tags":[6731,21,3495,2116,228789,40814,88,28634],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294194"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294194"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":294196,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294194\/revisions\/294196"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/294195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}