The long space trip of a failed Soviet Venus land is over. After orbiting our globe for more than fifty years, the Kosmos 482 probe crashed against the earth on Saturday.
According to the Russia Russian Space Agency, the Reengrician took place on the Indian Ocean west of Yakarta, Indonesia, around 2:24 am et (0624gmt or 9:24 am Moscow time). It seems that Kosmos 482 fell into the sea without causing any damage.
But that is just an estimate; Other monitoring groups and space agencies projected re -entry points that range from the Eastern Pacific to the Peninsula of Southern Asia. We do not know if or when we will see with certainty where Kosmos 482 fell.
While Kosmos 482 sailed over Rome, Italy, just before dawn on May 10, astronomer Gianluca Masi of the virtual telescope project captured an image of the spaceship during one of his last orbits.
“Visible as a path that enters the field of vision from the top and points to the lower right corner,” Masi said on his website, the investigation is evident in the image. “The image is the sum of four images, this is the reason why the trail of cosmos 482 seems discontinuous.”
The planet in which Kosmos 482 intended to settle is not the earth. The spacecraft was a component of the Venera program of the Soviet Union, which in the sixties and seventies, and early eighties, sent a fleet of probes to Venus.
In 1972, Kosmos 482 took off to the suffocating sister planet of the Earth, but a malfunction of the rocket left the spacecraft trapped in an elliptical orbit around the planet. The probe was gradually dragged down by atmospheric resistance over the next 53 years, culminating in the spectacular conclusion of today.
During their scorching trips back to earth, most of the large pieces of space garbage, such as bodies of spent rockets and decomposing satellites, separate, produce man -made meteor showers.
