A Soviet spacecraft has returned to Earth

A Soviet space probe stuck in orbit since a failed 1972 launch has finally crashed to Earth.

At 9:24 a.m. Moscow time (2:24 a.m. EDT) on May 10, the spacecraft, dubbed Kosmos 482, entered Earth’s atmosphere “560 km west of Middle Andaman Island, and fell into the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta,” the Russian space agency Roscosmos reported.

There had been much speculation over where it would land. But it was unlikely the probe would hurt anyone or even land in a populated area, astronomer Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., said in the days leading up to reentry. “It is alarming, but not end-of-the-world alarming.”

Kosmos 482 launched on March 31, 1972, as part of a two-pronged mission to Venus. It and its sister craft followed the success of Venera 7, whose 1970 touchdown on Venus marked the first soft landing on another planet. The first launch earlier in March 1972 sent a probe called Venera 8 to land on Venus, where it lasted nearly an hour.

The second launch didn’t go so well. The upper stage of the rocket didn’t fire correctly, and the craft never got fast enough to escape Earth’s gravity. The rocket and the craft meant to carry the lander to Venus split into several pieces, two of which reentered Earth’s atmosphere in the early 1980s.

One piece, thought to be the Venus descent vehicle, remained on a wide elliptical orbit, which took it nearly 10,000 kilometers from Earth at its farthest point. Over the years, the object’s orbit had been steadily shrinking. Most recently, the craft’s orbit was more like a circle that took it just 350 kilometers from Earth­. Eventually, it lacked the energy to fight the Earth’s gravity and the slowing effects of the atmosphere.

The Venera probes were built to withstand the punishing temperature and pressure of Venus’ atmosphere. That means Kosmos 482 was likely to survive all the way to the ground, rather than burning up in Earth’s atmosphere like most space debris. The probe was expected to hit Earth moving at a few hundred kilometers per hour, a speed comparable to an airplane in flight, McDowell says.

“It’s like a medium-sized car falling out of the sky,” he says.

But he wasn’t worried. Most of the Earth is water, and much of the land is uninhabited, he points out. If the probe had hit a populated area, it could have damaged a building or even killed a person. “You don’t want it to hit you,” he says. But the odds of it hitting someone were one in a few thousand.

Part of the rocket that launched Kosmos 482 actually did land where people live, on a farm in New Zealand, two days after it launched.

While Kosmos 482’s return to Earth is a one-time event, it may be a preview of what’s to come. The number of objects in low-Earth orbit has skyrocketed in recent years. Many are part of satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink, which are designed to burn up in Earth’s atmosphere within five years of launch.

But that doesn’t always happen. In 2024, two pieces of SpaceX craft were found on farms in Saskatchewan, Canada. Others have been found in Brazil, Australia, North Carolina and Poland. Fragments of Chinese spacecraft have been found in India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan.

Most of this space junk comes from jettisoned rocket parts. SpaceX has since changed its rocket reentry strategy to mitigate the problem, McDowell says.

But one of those chunks that landed in Saskatchewan — a laptop-sized piece of metal­ — was likely from a Starlink satellite, says astronomer Samantha Lawler of the University of Regina in Canada. And with 7,000 Starlink satellites in orbit­ — and more coming — that’s much more concerning, she says.

“If they’re dropping pieces like that with even a fraction of the 7,000 satellites, just by the sheer numbers, that is terrifying,” Lawler says.

Still, she says, the risk to any one person is low. “Space debris could kill someone, somewhere. But as an individual person, you don’t need to worry about it.”