The Soviet space probe Cosmos 482, launched in March 1972 in order to explore the planet Venus, but never abandoned the Earth’s orbit, fell this Saturday in the Indian Ocean, as reported today by the Russian Space Agency, Roscosmos.
The device “ceased to exist when leaving its orbit and falling into the Indian Ocean,” says the statement posted on Telegram.
Cosmos 482, whose diameter was approximately one meter and its mass is less than 500 kilos, entered the dense layers of the atmosphere at 06.24 GMT about 560 kilometers west of the island of Andamán del Medio.
It was controlled by an automated alert system
The apparatus finally sank into the waters of the West of the Indonesian capital, Yakarta, said the statement, who emphasizes that the controlled resentment of the probe in the earth’s atmosphere took place according to the planned calculations.
“The descent of the device was controlled by an automated alert system on dangerous situations in space near Earth,” Roscosmos explained.
During the last days the scientific community had widely speculated on whether the device would resist the reentry and on the place where the Soviet ship would finally fall.
Roscosmos had ensured that the probability that damage to the impact of the probe against our planet, nothing to do with a meteorite, was very low.
Meanwhile, NASA stressed that, since the device was designed to resist passing through the atmosphere of Venus, denser than earthly, it was possible that the probe or, at least, part of it, survived the reentry and took land without major damage.
The probe has a protective coat of semiglobular titanium, according to experts, and is equipped with 2.5 -meter parachute to slow down their speed, although they doubted that it would still work after more than half a century.
According to Roscosmos, only last year in the Earth’s atmosphere, 1,981 space objects of natural and artificial origin were entered, five every day, of the one in seven weighs more than 500 kilograms.
The Cosmos 482 probe of the Venera Program (Venus), which was launched on March 31, 1972 from the Baikonur cosmodrome, never managed to abandon the low terrestrial 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 was baptized as Cosmos 482 after its failure, denomination given to the artifacts that remain in circter-sized orbits after the mission failure.
The probe contained equipment for the study of spatial particle flows; Gamma spectrometers to study the composition of the surface of Venus and the content of ammonia in its atmosphere; A photometer to study lighting, and equipment to determine temperature and atmospheric pressure.
After its launch with a Molnia-M carrier rocket, whose first three stages worked normally, the mission failed due to a ruling of the fourth propulsor stage, which worked for 125 seconds instead of the 192 seconds planned.
After an apparent attempt to launch in a transfer trajectory to Venus, the ship separated into four pieces: two remained in low terrestrial orbit and declined in 48 hours, and the others (presumably the landing probe and the motor unit of the upper stage detached) entered a higher orbit, according to NASA data.
Initially, the probe, together with the fourth stage of the propeller, remained in an elliptical orbit of 220 kilometers by 9,800 kilometers, but after half a century the maximum distance of the ellipse was reduced to a quarter, so its fall to the ground was inevitable.
In addition to the Venera -14 in total, the Soviet Union also launched the Vega hot springs (1 and 2).
