SOURCE :- THE AGE NEWS
By Stephen Delahunty
A Cold War-era spacecraft has come crashing down to Earth after being stuck in orbit for more than five decades.
An unconfirmed report from Russian space agency Roscosmos claimed that the Kosmos 482 splashed down in the Indian Ocean, west of Jakarta.
A Venera module similar to the Kosmos-482 that has crashed back to Earth.Credit: NASA
Experts from around the globe had been monitoring Kosmos 482, but its eccentric orbit, coupled with space weather, made its potential landing site difficult to predict.
In an update on its Telegram channel, Roscosmos said: “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 kilometres 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.”
Both the EU Space Surveillance and Tracking Operations Centres and the US Space Command have been monitoring the probe after it suffered a rocket malfunction and ended up trapped in orbit around Earth for 53 years.
A Soviet stamp commemorating the 1972 Venera 8 mission to Venus.
The European Space Agency (ESA) space debris office had calculated that the craft would “come down at a point between 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south of the equator”.
The last update to the live ESA blog at 9.56am on Saturday said: “As the descent craft was not spotted by radar over Germany at the expected 07:32 UTC/09:32 CEST pass, it is most likely that the re-entry has already occurred.”
The craft was fortified to withstand the extreme conditions on the surface of Venus, which has temperatures of 477 degrees and pressure over 90 times that of Earth.
A team of researchers from University College London, the University of Colorado Boulder and Space Environment Technologies, who have been working to predict the capsule’s crash site, said earlier this week that the craft was likely to land in the ocean.
Dr Marcin Pilinski, a research scientist at the laboratory for atmospheric and space physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, said: “The odds that this relic will land in a populated area are very low. It will very likely land in the ocean. But we can’t yet say for certain where that will be.
“People who monitor asteroids to see if they will potentially impact Earth actually have an easier job. Those objects would enter at a really steep angle. They’re not skimming part of the atmosphere for days or weeks like this spacecraft.”
Space junk and meteors regularly plummet through Earth’s atmosphere, but most burn up or disintegrate on entry, posing little risk. However, the extra-strong casing on Kosmos 482 had made researchers more worried than usual.
The Telegraph, London
Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.
