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The long space odyssey of a failed Soviet Venus lander has ended. After more than fifty years in orbit, the Kosmos 482 spacecraft crashed to Earth on Saturday.
According to Russia's space agency Roscosmos, the reentry occurred over the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia, at around 2:24am ET (0624GMT or 9:24am Moscow time). It appears that Kosmos 482 dropped into the water without inflicting any harm.
However, this is just one estimate; other monitoring groups and satellite agencies have forecast reentry places ranging from the eastern Pacific to the South Asian peninsula. We don't know whether or when we'll know exactly where Kosmos 482 went down.
As Kosmos 482 passed over Rome, Italy, shortly before dawn on May 10, astronomer Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project caught an image of the spacecraft on one of its final orbits.
"Visible as a trail entering the field of view from the top and pointing to the bottom right corner," Masi claimed on his website, the probe is visible. "The picture is the sum of four images, this is why the trail of Cosmos 482 looks dashed."
Kosmos 482 was not designed to settle on Earth. The spacecraft was part of the Soviet Union's Venera programme, which sent a series of probes to Venus throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s.
In 1972, Kosmos 482 launched for Earth's hot sister planet, but a rocket malfunction trapped the spacecraft in an elliptical orbit around the planet. Over the next 53 years, atmospheric pull slowly drove the probe lower, culminating in today's stunning denouement.
The bulk of huge pieces of space junk, such as spent rocket bodies and decaying satellites, break apart on their fiery return to Earth, resulting in man-made meteor showers.
