A pretty baby half-tonne.
“It will hurt if it hits you”. Dutch researcher Marco Langbroek does not think so well. Indeed, the probe Cosmos 482 will crash on earth in the coming hours.
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This probe dating from the Soviet era was launched in 1972. Senséed spinning towards Venus, it was the victim of a failure of the upper floor. Suddenly, she never left the terrestrial orbit. But now, half a century later, Cosmos 482 lost speed and is about to make a return to square one. A rather smashing return.
“Prepared for”
And for good reason: uncontrollable, the probe will enter the atmosphere in the coming hours. And it should cross it because it was built to withstand the high temperatures of Venus, or 500 degrees. “Normally, an object of this size and this mass should disintegrate, because small objects, when they enter the atmosphere, undergo a lot of friction”explains Miquel Surreda, doctor of aerospace engineering at the University Polytechnique in Barcelona. “But in this case, as is prepared to withstand the high temperatures and pressures of the Venusian atmosphere, it is very likely that it does not disintegrate and that it reaches the almost intact terrestrial surface”.
The forecast now indicates: fall tomorrow 10, at 9:34, but the uncertainty is still high, +/- 10.6 hours.
The falling place is still indeterminate, and these are the orbits that remain until the descent. https://t.co/lot5xukv7j pic.twitter.com/JF4JHjKdM4– Joan Anton Català Amigó (@estelsiplanetes) https://twitter.com/estelsiplanetes/status/1920715563413746133?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
The machine of half a half should crash on the blows of 9:34 am this Saturday morning with a margin of more or less 10 hours.
Possible impact zone: somewhere between the north of the United Kingdom and southern New Zealand. Knowing that 71 % of the earth surface is covered with water, “the risks are not particularly high, but they are not zero,” summarizes an expert interviewed by Numerama.
