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Kosmos 482 crashes to unknown site on Earth

Soviet spacecraft Kosmos 482 apparently crashed to Earth Saturday May 10, 2025, more than 50 year after it was launched and was bound for Venus.

Saturday May 10, 2025 10:07 PM, Science Desk

Soviet spacecraft Kosmos 482 apparently crashed to Earth Saturday May 10, 2025, more than 50 year after it was launched and was bound for Venus.

Kosmos 482 Crash Site

Reports confirmed that the Cosmos 482 crashed, but the site of the crash is unknown.

However, speculations are rife that the Russia’s failed spacecraft crashed likely in the Indian Ocean.

Some other reports said Kosmos 482 re-entered the atmosphere at 8:24 a.m. Saturday and plunged into the ocean west of the Indonesian capital, Jakarta.

Some reports, on the other hand, claimed that the Soviet Spacecraft Kosmos 482 crashed in Pacific Ocean.

According to the European Space Agency, the Russian spacecraft was last spotted by radar over Germany.

Kosmos 482, originally bound for Venus, was launched on March 31, 1972. The attempted Soviet Venus probe, however, failed to escape low Earth orbit.

Not the first crash

It is however not the first part of the Soviet Venus probe to crash to Earth. After achieving an Earth parking orbit, Kosmos 482 made an apparent attempt to launch into a Venus transfer trajectory.

It separated into four pieces, two of which remained in low Earth orbit and decayed within 48 hours into south New Zealand.

The first of these pieces or space debris, crashed outside Ashburton, New Zealand in April 1972 whereas the was discovered near Eiffelton, New Zealand, in 1978, according to The Space Review.

The remaining two pieces of Kosmos 482 in orbit are likely to reenter sometime in the second week of May 2025, on early 9 or 10 May - after more than 50 years in space.

While space junk and meteors routinely veer toward a crash-landing on Earth, most of the objects disintegrate as they’re torn apart due to friction and pressure as they hit Earth’s thick atmosphere while traveling thousands of miles per hour.

But if the Cosmos 482 object is indeed a Soviet reentry capsule, it would be equipped with a substantial heat shield, meaning it “might well survive Earth atmosphere entry and hit the ground", according to Dr. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

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