Leonard David's INSIDE OUTER SPACE

Soviet Venera 8 landing capsule. Venera 8 was one of a pair of Venus atmospheric lander probes designed for the spring 1972 launch window. The other mission, Cosmos 482, failed to leave Earth orbit.
Image credit: NASA/NSSDCA

The news is down and out…Kosmos 482 is back on Earth!

In a communiqué from Russia’s Roscosmos:

The Kosmos-482 spacecraft deorbited and fell into the ocean.

The Kosmos-482 spacecraft, launched in 1972, ceased to exist, deorbiting and falling into the Indian Ocean.

The descent of the spacecraft was monitored by the Automated Warning System for Hazardous Situations in Near-Earth Space.

According to calculations by specialists from TsNIIMash (part of Roscosmos), the spacecraft entered the dense layers of the atmosphere at 9:24 Moscow time, 560 km west of Middle Andaman Island, and fell into the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta.

The spacecraft was launched in the spring of 1972 to study Venus, but due to a malfunction of the booster block, it remained in a high elliptical orbit of the Earth, gradually approaching the planet.

Venera 8 was one of a pair of Venus atmospheric lander probes designed for the spring 1972 launch window. The other mission, Cosmos 482, failed to leave Earth orbit.
Image credit: Hall of Venus/NPO Lavochkin

All over the map

Meanwhile, satellite tracker Marco Langbroek of the Netherlands, said the Roscosmos posting is “reasonably in line” with a reentry model he and his colleague at TU Delft uses.

However, he questions whether any statement coming from Russia these days can be regarded as reliable. “Plus, this will probably also be some model result based on an earlier detection.”

The reentry time and location the Russians mention does not come with any indication of an uncertainty interval, Langbroek tells Inside Outer Space.

Model results

“We do not know whether is is accurate to 10 minutes, to half an hour, or to a full hour. Therefore it is completely unclear whether this position and time is more authoritative (as it seems to be taken, without any real valid reason) than the other reentry model results. Because in all likelihood this is but just another reentry model result,” Langbroek observes.

Furthermore, the last Time of Impact Prediction (TIP) by the Combined Space Operations Center (CSpOC), the Space Delta 5 group based at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, “cannot be correct,” Langbroek states. They issued a 5:32 plus or minus 12 minute UTC TIP.

That’s questionable, Langbroek notes, as the European Space Agency reported a positive radar detection of the object from Germany at 6:04 UTC (and a “no-show” at 7:32 UTC), “so reentry must have been between 6:04 – 7:32 UTC and cannot have been before 6:04 UTC.”

Image credit: CNEOS

Reentry fireball

Langbroek adds that he’s still hoping for a post-reentry TIP with a 1-min plus/minus to appear. That information may be based on classified military spacecraft that pick up the fireball signature as objects pierce through the Earth’s atmosphere, such as bolides. This military intelligence data is sanitized and shared with civilians.

That data is posted on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) website.

Additionally, Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instruments on U.S. GOES weather satellites can detect fireballs and bolides.

The Geostationary Lightning Mapper is a single-channel, near-infrared optical transient detector that can detect the momentary changes in an optical scene, indicating the presence of lightning.
Image credit: NOAA

Convergence coming?

In a new posting by The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) their predicted reentry time is May 10 at 06:29 UTC ± 2 hours.

Image credit: CORDS

Another popular satellite tracking website, SATFLARE, notes the object has decayed and offers a plot map, with a yellow track showing the re-enter window.

No shows

Image credit: SATFLARE

The European Union’s Space Surveillance and Tracking (EU SST) Operations Centers carried out analysis, information gathering and “no-shows” during passes of the errant spacecraft gear.

Doing that work, EU SST confirmed that object Cosmos 482’s Descent Craft decayed within the last estimated re-entry window (2025-05-10 06:04 UTC ±20 minutes).

Yellow lines: ground track before the center of the reentry window. Green lines: ground track after the center of the re-entry window. Red: over-flights of the space hardware inside European countries and overseas territories. The possible re-entry locations lied anywhere along the yellow and green lines.
(Image credit: EU SST)

All in all, stay tuned for, one hopes, a convergence of tracking data to pinpoint when and where the Cosmos 482 Venus decent lander fell to Earth.

Will it float? – apologies to David Letterman

As if to “muddy the waters,” Russian space historian Pavel Shubin is floating the idea that Kosmos 482’s Venus landing hardware could be found bobbing in ocean waters.

Water landing? Image credit: Pavel Shubin

Shubin placed the last orbit of the station on a sea traffic map, arrows noting where it entered and where it could have flown. 

Using Goggle translation from Russian, Shubin’s posting reads: “The capsule has no aerodynamic quality, so it should land along the route. Maybe someone will find it. The question is in the buoyancy of the station. It turns out to be at the limit, but it still looks like it should float in sea water. If it sinks, there is no chance of finding it. Although it can withstand a kilometer of water,” Shubin writes, in the event the object sinks out of sight.