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After looping through space for 53 years, a wayward Soviet spacecraft called Kosmos-482 returned to Earth, entering the dense layers of the planet\u2019s atmosphere at 9:24 a.m. Moscow time on Saturday, according to Roscosmos, the Russian state corporation that runs the space program.<\/p>\n
Designed to land on the surface of Venus, Kosmos-482 may have remained intact during its plunge. It splashed down in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia, Roscosmos said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Kosmos-482 was launched on March 31, 1972, but became stranded in Earth\u2019s orbit after one of its rocket boosters shut down prematurely. The spacecraft\u2019s return to Earth was a reminder of the Cold War competition that prompted science fiction-like visions of Earthbound powers projecting themselves out into the solar system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cIt recalls a time when the Soviet Union was adventurous in space \u2014 when we were all maybe more adventurous in space,\u201d said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks objects launched into orbit. \u201cIt\u2019s a bit of a bittersweet moment in that sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
While America had won the race to the moon, the Soviet Union, through its Venera program, kept its sights on Venus, Earth\u2019s twisted sister.<\/p>\n
From 1961 to 1984, the Soviets launched 29 spacecraft toward the shrouded world next door. Many of those missions failed, but more than a dozen did not. The Venera spacecraft surveilled Venus from orbit, collected atmospheric observations while gently descending through its toxic clouds, scooped and studied soil samples and sent back the first, and only, pictures we have from the planet\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n
\u201cKosmos-482 is a reminder that, 50 years ago, the Soviet Union reached the planet Venus. Here is a physical artifact of that project, of that time,\u201d said Asif Siddiqi, a historian at Fordham University who specializes in Soviet-era space and scientific activities. \u201cThere\u2019s something oddly strange and compelling to me about this, about how the past still continues to orbit the Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n
Half a century later, as nations plot a return to the moon and fling their probes toward Mars, Jupiter and various asteroids, a lonely Japanese space probe is the only vehicle orbiting Venus. Other proposed missions have faced delays and uncertain futures.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
During the space race, putting boots on the moon was the biggest prize \u2014 but the other worlds in our solar system were calling, too. As the United States focused increasingly on Mars, the Soviet Union turned its sights toward the second rock from the sun.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth sides had an interest in Mars at that time, but Venus was an easier target,\u201d said Cathleen Lewis, curator of international space programs and spacesuits at the Smithsonian Institution\u2019s National Air & Space Museum.<\/p>\n
Nearly the same size as Earth, Venus is often referred to as its twin, though it\u2019s about as un-Earthlike as rocky planets get. It is sheathed in a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and hidden beneath miles of sulfuric acid clouds. A casualty of a runaway greenhouse effect, the Venusian surface is a sweltering 870 degrees Fahrenheit, and crushed by atmospheric pressures about 90 times greater than those of Earth.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cHow do you build something that can survive a multimonth journey across the solar system, get to a planet through a thick atmosphere, get to the ground and not melt or be crushed, and take pictures?\u201d Dr. Siddiqi asked. \u201cIt\u2019s kind of an incredible problem to think about solving in the 1960s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Undeterred by the challenges posed by such a punishing world, the Soviets hurled their hardware at Venus, again and again. And there was no template for how to do it at the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou literally were inventing the thing you want to send to Venus,\u201d Dr. Siddiqi said. \u201cNowadays if a country like Japan were to want to send something to Venus, they have 50 years of textbooks and engineering manuals. In the \u201960s, you had nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Soviet Venera program achieved a number of superlatives: the first probes to enter another planet\u2019s atmosphere, the first spacecraft to safely land on another planet, the first to record the sounds of an alien landscape.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
The Kosmos-482 failure occurred during the middle of that timeline. And the re-entry on Saturday was not Earth\u2019s first encounter with the intended Venus lander.<\/p>\n
Around 1 a.m. local time on April 3, 1972, just a few days after the troubled launch, the town of Ashburton, New Zealand, was visited by several 30-pound titanium spheres, each the size of a beach ball and marked with Cyrillic lettering.<\/p>\n
One ended up in a turnip field, which alarmed the local citizenry. The New Zealand Herald reported in 2002 that one of the spheres \u201cwas eventually locked in a police cell in Ashburton because no one knew what to do with it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Although space law specifies that ownership of a crashed space object remains with the country that launched it, the Soviets didn\u2019t claim ownership of the spheres at the time. The \u201cspace balls\u201d were eventually returned to the farmers that found them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
And while Kosmos-482 was lost, its sibling, which had been launched a few days earlier, eventually landed on Venus was named Venera 8. That spacecraft survived and transmitted data from the surface for 50 minutes. Two years later, when Venera 9 and 10 arrived \u2014 for the Soviets, building in redundancy meant launching two of everything \u2014 they slowly descended through the clouds, touched down on the planet\u2019s surface, and beamed back images of a desolate, yellowish world.<\/p>\n
The Venera program ended in the mid-1980s with the ambitious Vega probes. Those missions launched in 1984, dropped landers on the Venusian surface in 1985 and flew by Halley\u2019s comet in 1986.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe \u201970s and \u201980s legacy of Soviet exploration of Venus was a point of pride for the U.S.S.R.,\u201d Dr. Lewis said.<\/p>\n
The Kosmos-482 re-entry, while unique for historical reasons, is not that unusual. Today, nations and companies are launching still more hardware into orbit, leaving no shortage of objects falling from the sky.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u201cRe-entries are very frequent now,\u201d said Greg Henning, an engineer and space debris expert at the Aerospace Corporation, a federally supported nonprofit that tracks objects in orbit. \u201cWe\u2019re seeing dozens of them a day. Most of the time they go unnoticed.\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s especially true in the current moment, when the sun is quite active, because increased solar activity puffs up the Earth\u2019s atmosphere and increases drag on orbiting objects.<\/p>\n
Some of those re-entries put on spectacular light shows. They may result from controlled plummets back to Earth, like those of SpaceX\u2019s cargo and crew capsules. Others are accidental, like the failed test flights of SpaceX\u2019s Starship prototypes. And others are deliberately uncontrolled and potentially quite hazardous, as has been the case with China\u2019s Long March 5B rocket boosters, objects big enough to cause significant problems if they re-enter over a populated area.<\/p>\n
But on rare occasions, an object like Kosmos-482 will return to Earth as a record of humankind\u2019s first steps into the space that girdles the Earth.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s an archive of the space race, still circling the Earth. There\u2019s so much stuff that was launched in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s,\u201d Dr. Siddiqi said. \u201cSometimes we\u2019re reminded that there\u2019s this museum there because it drops on our heads.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n