According to Ros Cosmos, a state company that runs the Russian space program, after 53 years of looping through space, a Soviet spacecraft called the Cosmos-482 returned to Earth and entered the atmosphere of Moscow at 9:24am on Saturday.
The Cosmos 482, designed to land on the surface of Venus, could have remained intact at the time of its plunge. According to Roscosmos, it was scattered across the Indian Ocean in western Jakarta, Indonesia.
The Kosmos-482 was released on March 31, 1972, but was tied to Earth's orbit after one of the rocket boosters shut down prematurely. The return of the spaceship to Earth reminded me of the Cold War race. This prompted a science-fiction-like vision of Earth-bound forces projecting themselves onto solar systems.
“It reminds me of the time when the Soviet Union was adventurous in space. We may all be more adventurous in space,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, tracking objects launched into orbit. “In that sense, it's a bittersweet moment.”
While America had won the race to the moon, the Soviet Union had set its sights on Earth's twisted sister, Venus, through its Venella program.
From 1961 to 1984, the Soviets launched 29 spacecrafts towards the next shroud world. Many of these missions have failed, but more than a dozen have failed. The Venella spacecraft monitored Venus from orbit, collected atmospheric observations, gently descended its toxic clouds, scooped and researched soil samples, and sent back only the first photos from the planet's surface.
“Kosmos-482 reminds us that the Soviet Union reached the planet Venus 50 years ago, a physical artifact of that project,” says Asif Siddiqi, a Soviet-era university historian, specializing in Soviet-era space and scientific activities. “There's something strangely weird and persuasive about this, about how the past continues orbiting the Earth.”
Half a century later, when the country returns to the moon and throws its probes at Mars, Jupiter and various asteroids, the lonely Japanese space probe is Venus, the only vehicle. Other proposed missions face delays and uncertain futures.
While putting boots on the moon during the space race was the biggest prize, it also called the rest of our solar system. As the US was increasingly focused on Mars, the Soviet Union turned its sight towards a second rock from the sun.
“At the time, both sides were interested in Mars, but Venus was an easier target,” said Kathleen Lewis, curator of the International Space Program and Space Station at the Smithsonian Association's National Air and Space Museum.
Venus, which is roughly the same size as Earth, is often called twins, but is as Earth-like as a rocky planet gets. Covered by a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide, hidden beneath a miles of sulfate clouds. The surface of Venus, a victim of the runaway greenhouse effect, is swelling at 870 degrees Fahrenheit, crushed by atmospheric pressures about 90 times greater than Earth's Fahrenheit.
“How do you build something that can survive a multimonthly journey across the solar system, reach the planet through a thick atmosphere, and not be photographed without being melted or crushed?” Dr. Siddiki asked. “It's an incredible problem to think about solving it in the 1960s.”
The Soviets, unattended by the challenges posed by such a punishing world, threw hardware at Venus over and over again. And there was no template for how to do that at the time.
“You were literally inventing what you wanted to send to Venus,” Dr. Siddiki said. “If today a country like Japan wants to send something to Venus, they have a 50-year textbook and an engineering manual. In the 60s, you were nothing.”
The Soviet Venella programme has achieved many of the finest. It is the first probe into the atmosphere of another planet, the first spacecraft to safely land on another planet, the first spacecraft to record the sounds of an alien landscape.
The Kosmos-482 breakdown occurred midway through that timeline. And Saturday's re-entry wasn't the first Earth encounter with the intended Venus Lander.
Around 1am on April 3, 1972, just a few days after the problematic launch, the town of Ashburton, New Zealand, visited several 30-pound titanium balls, each of the size of a beach ball, marked with Cyrillic lettering.
One ended with a field of turnips, and local citizens were wary. The New Zealand Herald reported in 2002 that one of the spheres was “ultimately locked up in a police cell in Ashburton.”
Space law specifies that ownership of a crashed space object remains in the country that launched it, but the Soviets did not claim ownership of the sphere at the time. “Space Balls” were eventually returned to the farmers who found them.
And while Cosmos-482 was lost, the brothers, launched a few days ago, eventually landed on Venus, and were named Venella 8. The spacecraft survived and sent data from the surface for 50 minutes. Two years later, when Venella 9 and 10 arrived – for the Soviets, building redundancy meant firing all two.
The Venera program ended in the mid-1980s with an ambitious Vega probe. Starting in 1984, these missions dropped a landing aircraft on the surface of Venus in 1985 and flew by Halley's Comet in 1986.
“The legacy of Soviet Venus exploration in the 70s and 80s was a point of pride for the Soviet Union,” Dr. Lewis said.
Kosmos-482 re-entry is unique for historical reasons, but not so unusual. Today, countries and businesses are putting even more hardware into orbit, with no shortage of objects falling from the sky.
“Re-entry is seen very often right now,” said Greg Henning, an engineer and space debris expert at Aerospace Corporation, a federally-backed non-profit that tracks objects in orbit. “We see dozens of people a day. Most of the time, they're not noticed.”
This is especially true at the present moment, as increased solar activity inflates the Earth's atmosphere and increases the resistance of orbiting objects.
Some of those re-entries wore spectacular light shows. They can arise from returning to Earth from a controlled plummet, like SpaceX cargo and crew capsules. As the test flight of SpaceX's Starship prototype failed, the rest is by chance. Also, as with China's long March 5B rocket booster, others are intentionally uncontrolled and extremely dangerous.
However, in rare cases, objects like Kosmos-482 return to Earth as a record of humanity's first steps.
“There's an archive of space races and it's still circling the Earth. There are a lot of things that were released in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s,” Dr. Siddiki said. “Sometimes, this museum falls on my head, so I remember that there is this museum there.”
Jonathan Wolf contributed to the report.
