Orbital journey comes to an end

MOSCOW (EFE).— The Soviet space probe Cosmos 482, launched in March 1972 to explore the planet Venus but never left Earth orbit, crashed yesterday in the Indian Ocean, the Russian space agency Roscosmos reported.

The device "ceased to exist when it left its orbit and fell into the Indian Ocean," the statement posted on Telegram said.

Cosmos 482, with a diameter of about one meter and a mass of less than 500 kilograms, entered the dense atmosphere at 06:24 GMT about 560 kilometers west of Middle Andaman Island.

The device eventually sank in the Indian Ocean west of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta, the statement said, emphasizing that the probe's controlled reentry into the Earth's atmosphere took place as planned.

"The descent of the aircraft was controlled by an automated alert system for hazardous situations in near-Earth space," Roscosmos said.

In recent days, the scientific community had speculated widely about whether the craft would survive reentry and where the Soviet craft would ultimately crash-land.

Roscosmos had stated that the probability of damage from the probe's impact on the planet, which had nothing to do with a meteorite, was very low.

Meanwhile, NASA emphasized that since the device was designed to withstand passage through Venus's denser atmosphere than Earth's, it was possible that the probe, or at least part of it, would survive re-entry without major damage.

The probe has a semi-globular titanium protective shell, according to experts, and is equipped with 2.5-meter parachutes to slow its speed, although they doubted it would still work after more than half a century.

According to Roscosmos, 1,981 natural and man-made space objects entered the Earth's atmosphere last year alone—five every day—of which one in seven weighs more than 500 kilograms.

The Cosmos 482 probe of the Venera (Venus) program, which was launched on March 31, 1972, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, never managed to leave low Earth orbit due to technical failures.

The official name of the probe—which duplicated the Venera-8 station, which did reach its destination on July 22, 1972—was 3V671, but it was christened Cosmos 482 after its failure, a name given to artifacts that remain in circumterrestrial orbits after the mission fails.

Following its launch on a Molnia-M launch vehicle, whose first three stages operated normally, the mission failed due to a failure of the fourth booster stage, which operated for 125 seconds instead of the planned 192.

After an apparent attempt to launch on a transfer trajectory to Venus, the craft separated into four pieces: two remained in low-Earth orbit and decayed within 48 hours, and the others (presumably the lander and the detached upper stage engine unit) entered a higher orbit, according to NASA data.

Initially, the probe, along with the fourth stage of the booster, remained in an elliptical orbit measuring 220 kilometers by 9,800 kilometers, but after half a century, the maximum distance of the ellipse had been reduced to a quarter, making its fall to Earth inevitable.

In addition to the Veneras - 14 in total - the Soviet Union also launched the Vega aerostatic probes (1 and 2) to Venus.