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Len Entwisle informs me there’s increasing online chatter about this historical space probe coming back ‘home’.
Designated Kosmos 482 it’s the landing module of a Venera Venus probe launched in 1972. It failed to escape low Earth orbit and the core unit with a mass of about 480kg is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on around May 10.
See Marco Langbroek’s blog for more details:
https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosmos-842-descent-craft-reentry.html
The lander is very rugged, designed to survive the high G-forces and intense heat of descent through Venus’ atmosphere, so it’s likely to reach the ground intact. During the Science Museum Exhibition (Cosmonauts: Birth of the Space Age) they had the engineering model of the Venera 7 lander on display. It looked like an enormous Scotch egg that had been constructed out of brown concrete.
Alex.
Unfortunately we don’t have any night-time passes of this spacecraft coming up.
This page will get updated as the TLEs get updated:
https://aerospace.org/reentries/6073
The current re-entry prediction is 2025 May 10 04:42 UTC +/- 19 hours.
I might be in the Yorkshire Dales during the re-entry. Looks like I’ll be fairly safe up there and won’t need to take my tin hat.
The latest prediction from Marco Langbroek is that re-entry will occur around 06:30 UTC tomorrow, May 10, with an uncertainty of +/- 4.1 hr:
https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosmos-842-descent-craft-reentry.html
The latest TLE from space-trak (dated March 9.655) has perigee down to 127 km. The spacecraft has passes over the UK on May 10 as follows (times are UTC):
04:34 – Low elevation in the southeast.
06:05 – Almost overhead
07:36 – Almost overhead
09:06 – Low in the southwest.All of these are in daylight so if it does re-enter over the UK we are unlikely to see it but, if the sky is clear it might be worth looking when it comes over.
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