The specialist Marco Langbroek, from the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands, announced the latest calculations on the inevitable fall of the Kosmos 482 Soviet probe, which had as its destination the planet Venus and was launched in 1972.
Langbroek confirmed that The impact of the capsule would take place this Saturday, May 10 and said the planet strip in which the fall could be given.
He did it through a series of calculations and graphs published in his account in X, formerly Twitter, in which he highlighted the areas where Kosmos 482 could collide. The drawn strip includes much of the southern United States and practically all of Latin America except a few kilometers in southern Chile and Argentina and the East of South America.
The point of possible impact It extends to European areas from France to the south, Asia (with the exception of Japan) and Oceania.
The graph, in this sense, only exempts a large part of Russia and Africa, areas of Asia, Canada, the United Kingdom, Greenland, the Scandinavian countries, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and some areas of countries such as Germany and Poland.
“Uncertainty has now become small enough to exclude certain areas. Japan, the northwest of the USA. And most of Africa (except the northwest and northeast extremes) are now safe. The spacecraft can descend anywhere from the blue lines of the map, ”said Langbroek this Friday.
The capsule, which is apparently intact since it was launched and has been in space during the last 53 years, weighs 500 kilos and would enter the earth into a phenomenon similar to that of a meteorite that falls and impacts without control in any part of the planet.
Langbroek, a satellite observer based in the Netherlands, He has said that the capsule is planned to hit strong and fast in its entrance to the Earth.
“With a mass of just under 500 kg and a size of one meter, the risks are similar to those of the impact of a meteor,” said the renowned researcher who has been taken as a reliable source in this spatial case by various media in the world.
The probe He never arrived in Venus due to failures in the midst of launchalthough another ship of similar characteristics, Venera 7, did manage to enter the hot planet.
Venera 7 was, in fact, the first ship that managed to perch on the surface of Venus and transmit information from there.
Known as Kosmos 482, the capsule was designed to resist the impact of entering the atmosphere of Venus, so it is very likely that he can resist his re -entry to the earth. Although the Soviet ship was built with a parachute, it is very unlikely that this works as in its creation.
Despite the precise calculations, the re -entry of the ship does not imply a great risk to humanity. It is calculated, according to The Aerospace Corporation, which The probability that Kosmos 482 hits someone is one by 25,000.
Kosmos 482 was born thanks to the Soviet Institute of Space Research (IKI) in the middle of the space race that had the Soviet Union with the United States.
With that initiatory, the Iki decided to create the ship to put a probe in Venus, however, it never reached its destination. Kosmos 482 belonged to the ‘Venera’ program, a series of probes They had a destination to Venus in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1972, finally, the Soviet Union achieved its goal.
