The “Cosmos 482” Soviet probe crashes against India after being out of control half a century ago | Science
The Soviet probe Cosmos 482 He finally fell to the ground. After wandering More than half a century for the terrestrial orbit, the ship, launched in 1972 in the framework of a mission in Venus, was affected by the atmosphere this Saturday and, according to Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, crashed in the Indian Ocean shortly before half of the eight in the morning (Spanish peninsular time). In a Message of the telegram, The Russian agency indicated that, according to the calculations of the specialists of the Russian center for the rockets and the space saved Tsnimash, who is part of Roscosmos, the device entered the atmosphere at 9:24 in Moscow – an hour less in Spain Peninsular – “560 kilometers to the west of the island of Andamán Medio and Felling Yakarta”. Space surveillance and monitoring of the European Union have also confirmed that, according to Your analysisThe probe has disintegrated in a temporal window that coincides over time indicated by the Russian agency.
The main spatial agencies of the planet were following the uncontrolled resentment of the Soviet probe Cosmos 482 For days and although the forecasts have been perfected while the expected date was approaching, the uncertainty on the exact place and time of king -entry has been high up to the last moment. After a few minutes of the morning of this Saturday, the Space Waste Office radar of the European Space Agency (ESA) detected the ship on Germany. According to its forecasts, the German country should have returned around 9.30, but the radars did not capture anything. “Since the ship was not detected by the radar in Germany on the plan A blog where they were monitoring the ri -entry.
The Soviet probe Cosmos 482 He is an artifact released 53 years ago that he has never reached his destination: Venus. This is the main reason why the fall of this object of waste of space on Earth is special. The ship was designed to bear the enormous pressures of the hottest planet of the Solar System, so that it could have survived for a while on its return to the terrestrial atmosphere, scheduled in the morning from Friday to Saturday.
A few days ago, the monitoring protocol of the International Committee for the coordination of the space garbage was activated, an organism in which 13 space agencies are represented including the ESA, its American counterpart, the NASA, in addition to the agencies of the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Russia, Ukraine, China and Japan, among others. Although the whole committee is everything, the exchange of information between some of them is practically zero. Russia, for example, requires time without providing data, although its radar follow the space objects that periodically fall on earth. The largest source of information for the western world is provided by Nasa With its radar network, although both the ESA and some of the European agencies have their own tools.
The uncontrolled probe completes an orbit on earth every hour and a half. Each radar can observe this object about four times a day and estimate when and where it will fall. The problem is that it is very difficult to predict the behavior of this object in the layers of the atmosphere they have between 100 and 200 kilometers of altitude. Added to this is the uncertainty of the solar activity and other unknown factors, as if the capsule had a parachute, and if it is deployed, or if it has already done so, explains the engineer Benjamín Bastida Virgili, who works in the spatial surveillance service of the ASO in Darmstadt, in Germany. All these factors make the margin of error on the fall date were almost a day before or after, and that almost all the earth was inside the fall trajectory.
THE Cosmos 482 He was launched in March 1972. He never managed to escape the low earthly orbit. After reaching a parking orbit around the Earth, the ship apparently tried to launch towards a transfer trajectory to Venus. However, it separated in four parts: two of them remained in low earth or they decade within 48 hours, while the other two pieces, presumably the landing probe and the motor unit of the separate upper phase, entered a higher orbit between 210 and 9,800 kilometers of the earth, According to NASA. It is believed that a bankruptcy has caused the engine on not reaching the speed necessary for the transfer to Venus, leaving the load useful in this elliptical terrestrial orbit which has decreased over time until it falls in the next few days.
The 495 kilos landing module has been designed to endure 300 times the acceleration of terrestrial gravity and a pressure 100 times higher than that of our planet, explains the ESA. As a result, it could survive its return to the atmosphere.
Spatial agencies have been taken as a precious experiment. The aerodynamic form of this ship makes it an ideal object to measure the density of the air in very low terrestrial orbits. Whenever the elliptical orbit passes through the Perigee, its closest point to the earth, loses the height in the peak, its highest part. This altitude difference allows you to deduce the atmospheric resistance addressed by the object only on the return. The design of most space vehicles is too complex to perform these studies, but the almost spherical form of the descent capsule makes it possible, transforming its return into a “accidental” scientific experiment of Recentrada.
The fall of large parts of the garbage of space is common. Parts of moderate rockets are affected almost every day, while the smaller objects of traced spatial waste do it even more frequently. The pieces that survive rarely cause damage to the ground. With the growing spatial traffic, the frequency of these resentments will be increased in the future.
The risk that the return of a satellite causes injuries is extremely remote, explains the ESA. The annual risk of a person injured by space waste is less than 1 between 100,000 million.
