The Venera Mission Today.

The Soviet Cosmos 482 spacecraft is one of many missions that the Soviet Union tried to send to our neighboring planet Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera space program, which means Venus in Russian, which had the purpose of exploring that planet. This Soviet program was very successful. The ships sent managed to enter the atmosphere of another planet for the first time, make a soft landing on the surface of another planet, send the first images from the surface of another planet, record the first sounds from another planet and make the first high resolution radar mapping.

To achieve this, the Soviet strategy was to build multiple ships, some identical to make several attempts and increase the chances of success, 28 missions were sent and 13 were successful. A curious fact about the Soviet Venera space program is that after several failed attempts before the first success, they decided to give the name Venera only to the ships that managed to reach Venus and to those that stayed along the way they gave the name Cosmos and a distinctive number, in fact on March 27, 1972. 4 days before Cosmos 482 was launched, the Venera 8 spacecraft was sent to Venus where it would arrive 4 months later on July 22, landing successfully on the neighboring planet.

If Cosmos 482 had reached Venus it would have been called Venera 9, but that was not the case, so that name was reserved for the next successful spacecraft, Cosmos 482, which was not successful and that is why it is called Cosmos and not Venera. It was launched on March 31, 1972, it managed to get into Earth's orbit and everything was going well until it tried to make the push to escape the Earth's gravity and travel to the orbit of Venus.

The timer that was supposed to keep the engines on failed, turning them off prematurely, so the ship did not have the necessary momentum to escape the Earth's gravity and was stuck in an elliptical orbit. Both the Soviet Union and the United States since then tracked the launches and objects in orbit because the two powers needed to know if they were launching missiles at them in a form of aggression.

After the launch of Cosmos 482, the United States monitored several objects that remained in orbit and 90 days after the launch they detected the separation of one of those objects in two. It was the scientific capsule separating from the vehicle that should have taken it to the orbit of Venus. The capsule was programmed to separate from the vehicle 90 days after launch and enter the aggressive atmosphere of Venus to fall, open its parachute and land softly on its surface, but since the ship never reached Venus, the capsule separated in Earth's orbit where it remained for 53 years until now.

Dr. Marco Langbroek, a Dutch scientist who tracks satellites and is the author of the blog SatTrackCam, did his homework and calculated that the Cosmos 482 capsule will have an uncontrolled re-entry, that is, it will fall back to Earth between May 9 and 10, 2025.

He knows this with the help of mathematics, they created a mathematical prediction model with a colleague, a mathematical model is mathematical formulas that reproduce the behavior of a real-world phenomenon in order to make a forecast of how it will behave in the future, in this case the known data of an object with a certain mass, a certain size and shape, which has a specific orbit to know when it will fall, is calculated, due to the drag of the Earth's atmosphere that slows it down every time it passes nearby.

The model's prediction says that this will happen between May 9 and 10, but knowing when the capsule will fall is extremely difficult, because the Earth's atmosphere is inflating and shrinking all the time, reacting to the solar climate and if the Sun has a lot of activity in the next few days as is actually happening, it will slow it down more and end up falling faster.

Let's hope nothing happens and everything is under control.

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