INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Kosmos 482, a Soviet-era spacecraft shrouded in Cold War secrecy, will reenter the Earth's atmosphere in the next few days after misfiring
on a journey to Venus more than 50 years ago.On average, a piece of space junk the size of Kosmos 482, with a mass of about a half-ton,
falls into the atmosphere about once per week
What's different this time is that Kosmos 482 was designed to land on Venus, with a titanium heat shield built to withstand scorching
temperatures, and structures engineered to survive atmospheric pressures nearly 100 times higher than Earth's.So, there's a good chance the
spacecraft will survive the extreme forces it encounters during its plunge through the atmosphere
Typically, space debris breaks apart and burns up during reentry, with only a small fraction of material reaching the Earth's surface
The European Space Agency, one of several institutions that track space debris, says Kosmos 482 is "highly likely" to reach Earth's surface
in one piece.The Kosmos 482 spacecraft launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, now part of Kazakhstan, aboard a Molniya rocket on March 31,
A short time later, the rocket's upper stage was supposed to propel the probe out of Earth orbit on an interplanetary journey toward Venus,
where it would have become the third mission to land on the second planet from the Sun.But the rocket failed, rendering it unable to escape
the gravitational grip of Earth
The spacecraft separated into several pieces, and Russian engineers gave up on the mission
The main section of the Venus probe reentered the atmosphere in 1981, but for 53 years, the 3.3-foot-diameter (1-meter) segment of the
spacecraft that was supposed to land on Venus remained in orbit around the Earth, its trajectory influenced only by the tenuous uppermost
layers of the atmosphere.The mission was part of the Soviet Union's Venera program, which achieved the first soft landing of a spacecraft on
another planet with the Venera 7 mission in 1970, and followed up with another successful landing with Venera 8 in 1972
Because it failed, Soviet officials gave the next mission, which would have become Venera 9, a non-descriptive name: Kosmos 482.
