Soviet spacecraft crash lands on Earth after botched journey of half-a-century

After looping through space for 53 years, a wayward Soviet spacecraft called Kosmos-482 returned to Earth, entering the planet’s atmosphere at 9:24 a.m. Moscow time Saturday, according to Roscosmos, the state corporation that runs the Russian space program.

Designed to land on the surface of Venus, Kosmos-482 may have remained intact during its plunge. It splashed down in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia, Roscosmos said.

Kosmos-482 was launched March 31, 1972, but became stranded in Earth’s orbit after one of its rocket boosters shut down prematurely. The spacecraft’s return to Earth was a reminder of the Cold War competition that prompted science fiction-like visions of Earthbound powers projecting themselves out into the solar system.

“It recalls a time when the Soviet Union was adventurous in space — when we were all maybe more adventurous in space,” said Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks objects launched into orbit.

While America had won the race to the moon, the Soviet Union, through its Venera program, kept its sights on Venus, Earth’s twisted sister.

From 1961 to 1984, the Soviets launched 29 spacecraft toward the shrouded world next door. Many of those missions failed, but more than a dozen did not. The Venera spacecraft surveilled Venus from orbit, collected atmospheric observations while gently descending through its toxic clouds, scooped and studied soil samples and sent back the first, and only, pictures we have from the planet’s surface.

“Kosmos-482 is a reminder that, 50 years ago, the Soviet Union reached the planet Venus. Here is a physical artifact of that project, of that time,” said Asif Siddiqi, a historian at Fordham University who specializes in Soviet-era space and scientific activities.

Nearly the same size as Earth, Venus is often referred to as its twin, though it’s about as un-Earthlike as rocky planets get. It is sheathed in a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and hidden beneath miles of sulfuric acid clouds. A casualty of a runaway greenhouse effect, the Venusian surface is a sweltering 870 degrees Fahrenheit, and crushed by atmospheric pressures about 90 times greater than those of Earth.

The Soviet Venera program achieved a number of superlatives: the first probes to enter another planet’s atmosphere, the first spacecraft to safely land on another planet, the first to record the sounds of an alien landscape.