A potentially destructive Soviet Venus lander that was lost in space for over half a century has reentered the Earth's atmosphere. Tracked by various space agencies and individuals, the capsule crashed on May 10 somewhere in the Indian Ocean.
On May 10, 2025 at 06:24 GMT, the remnants of the Kosmos 482 probe entered the Earth's atmosphere. According to Roscosmos, the titanium capsule impacted somewhere over the eastern Indian Ocean about 248 miles (560 km) west of Middle Andaman Island and west of Jakarta, Indonesia.
Since dormant spacecraft re-enter the atmosphere on a regular basis, most are non-stories, but Kosmos 482 was something special. It was originally one of the Soviet Union's Venera series of probes intended to explore the planet Venus. However, shortly after launch on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in what is now Kazakhstan, the rocket suffered a malfunction that caused the spacecraft to break up and go into orbit around the Earth instead of heading for cloud-shrouded Venus.
Even that doesn't seem like much, except that the part of the probe that was predicted to prang into the Earth on May 10 was the lander capsule – a meter-wide, 1,091-lb (495-kg) titanium sphere designed to withstand deceleration forces of 300 g during atmospheric entry and then survive for over an hour on the surface of Venus where it rains sulfuric acid, the atmosphere is 90 times as dense as Earth's and it's hot enough to melt lead on a nice day.
With all that going for it, there was a very good chance that it could make it through Earth atmosphere reentry and hit the ground at 150 mph (242 km/h), which would put up the insurance premiums of whoever was in the vicinity. It would also have resulted in a very large bill for Russia, which is still the legal owner under international law.
The capsule was tracked by Roscosmos, ESA, the US Space Force, and independent space trackers, and images were captured that seem to not only confirm that this was the capsule, but also that the landing parachute was deployed – not that that mattered much because after 53 years cosmic radiation would have reduced the cloth to the consistency of exceedingly cheap tissue paper.
ESA reports that a radar tracking station in Germany failed to detect the spacecraft during a predicted pass at 07:32 GMT and Roscosmos claimed to have observed it striking the lower atmosphere. No witnesses have come forward claiming to have observed the reentry and there is no official confirmation as to where it broke up or splashed down in the sea.
Source: ESA