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Failed Soviet Venus lander Kosmos 482 crashes to Earth after 53 years in orbit
- thenthenthen 1y agoApparently it crashed near Java in the Indian Ocean [0]. Any news on retrieval efforts? [0] https://t.me/roscosmos_gk/17407 https://t.me/roscosmos_gk/17407
- rhcom2 1y agoComing down at "145 miles per hour-plus" and a "mass of just under 500 kg and 1-meter size" I would imagine there are just pieces out there now.
- SequoiaHope 1y agoApparently it was quite dense as to be able to survive the Venetian atmosphere so there has been speculation it may stay somewhat intact.
- rhcom2 1y agoIt was suppose to come down with a parachute but fingers crossed.
- perihelions 1y ago- "Venetian" That one means "having to do with Venice". Of Venus would be "Venusian", "Venereal" (yes, really), or "Cytherean". Or, one of a dozen others—it's a Greek god-name; there's millennia of culture to drawn on. There's an entire Wikipedia entry devoted to this adjective question, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytherean https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cytherean
- SequoiaHope 1y agoOh right! I did know that but typo’d it thanks.
- ForOldHack 1y agoAny thoughts about sunken vs sank?
- squigz 1y agoThat Italian atmosphere is really rough!
- dotancohen 1y agoSmells worse than the venereal atmosphere the craft was designed for.
- deepsun 1y agoThat's nothing compared to Venus. There it's 500C with sulfuric atmosphere.
- pinewurst 1y agoA lot like New Delhi...
- bell-cot 1y agoAnd ~1,300 psi at the surface, and a few other features. On the upside - undeveloped property is readily available, and quite affordable.
- perihelions 1y ago- "On the upside - undeveloped property is readily available, and quite affordable". It's a dry heat anyway.
- estreeper 1y agoIt wouldn’t be HN if your joke wasn’t met with pedantry, so I’ll mention the heat and pressure at the surface means the atmosphere is a supercritical fluid of 96.5% carbon dioxide and 3.5% nitrogen. Buyers should have all the facts
- sph 1y ago> quite affordable The commute to there is the real problem
- deepsun 1y agoToo expensive. It's very hard to find even an aircraft carrier at the surface, ocean is just too big. Metallic non-moving things at the bottom is easier, but it still often takes years to find a large sank ship, yet alone a small round spacecraft. But there are many ocean hunters ready to jump on the assignment, if you secure funding.
- nancyminusone 1y agoDarn. Where's an inexpensive carbon fiber based submarine when you need one?
- asdefghyk 1y agoThere have been searches for years for MH370 airline in Indian ocean and it has not been found. I guess the problem there is getting a more accurate? location where it came down...
- asdefghyk 1y agoAny information on ocean depth in that area? Or did it float? for a while? From NASA article - https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=1972-023A https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id... Apparently, it broke up too 4 pieces soon after launch time and it was the lander that was circling earth for 53 years.. From https://www.npr.org/2025/05/12/nx-s1-5395631/a-soviet-era-space-probe-crashed-back-to-earth-after-more-than-50-years-in-orbit#:~:text=It%20said%20Kosmos%20482%20reentered,a%20post%20on%20its%20website. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/12/nx-s1-5395631/a-soviet-era-sp... "...The Russian space agency Roscosmos said in a Telegram post that the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere Saturday morning at 2:24 a.m. ET and landed in the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, Indonesia. It said Kosmos 482 reentered the atmosphere about 350 miles west of Middle Andaman Island off the coast of Myanmar. ..." NASA gave the same reentry time and landing location for the spacecraft in a post on its website...."
- RetroTechie 1y ago>Any information on ocean depth in that area? Multiple km's deep in most of that area. That's if it missed the Sunda trench, which goes down to more than 7km in places (hint: it's a subduction zone where tectonic plates slide into Earth's interior. So ehm... deep). Unlike eg. the Gulf of Thailand (max. 85m according to Wikipedia) or large parts of South Chinese Sea, which are very shallow in comparison.
- alserio 1y agoNear Java? From memory, it will definetely be garbage collected, can't say when.
- justinator 1y agoThe entire Soviet Union Venus missions are absolutely fascinating. "Hardening" takes on a whole new meaning when you're preparing a craft to survive mere minutes on Venus' surface. I'm a little surprised their deep sea craft never got much attention.
- deepsun 1y agoUSSR focused on Venus, because at that time it wasn't apparent which one would be more interesting/accessible -- Venus or Mars. And USSR didn't want to compete with US anymore, after lost the Moon race. USSR really did want the Moon too, after so many prior successes. So switching to Venus allowed to "split" the race.
- lupusreal 1y agoThe Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars almost 30 years before NASA. Unfortunately the lander it was tethered to, Mars 3, stopped communicating about two minutes after landing so the rover didn't get a chance to go into action. Anyway, the Soviet Union's relative lack of success with Mars wasn't really for lack of trying. Space is hard.
- floxy 1y ago>The Soviet Union landed a rover on Mars almost 30 years before NASA. The Mars 3 landed on Mars in 1971: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_3 The NASA Viking program landed on Mars in 1976: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viking_program ...but I guess that didn't rove.
- lupusreal 1y agoRight, NASA's first remote controlled rover (anywhere) was Sojourner in 1997. The first successful remote controlled rover was the Soviet Lunokhod 1 in 1970. That succeeded in driving around the Moon for almost a year. Mars 3 didn't pan out but I still think that level of ambition from the Soviet Union, relative to NASA, is notable and worth celebrating.
- KyleBerezin 1y agoI wish we could push things like this into a higher orbit. High enough to not be a danger and to be preserved for future generations.
- HelloUsername 1y agoRelated: Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873531 02-may-2025 280 comments After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831602 29-april-2025 46 comments Soviet-era spacecraft plunges to Earth after 53 years stuck in orbit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949025 10-may-2025 0 comments A Soviet-era spacecraft built to land on Venus is falling to Earth instead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43938644 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43938644 09-may-2025 1 comment
- perihelions 1y agoThe other recent threads, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873531 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873531 ("Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry (leonarddavid.com)" — 291 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831602 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831602 ("After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth (gizmodo.com)" — 50 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944167 ("Cosmos 482 Descent Craft tracker (utexas.edu)") — 9 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43942194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43942194 ("Cosmos-482 descent craft re-entry prediction (esa.int)") — 5 comments
- daltont 1y agoPaging Steve Austin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puvc-FodxV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puvc-FodxV4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTWJc72p2pE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTWJc72p2pE
- codedokode 1y agoIt is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years. In USSR, unlike modern times, all products were made to last, like refrigerators, motorcycles, TV sets or clothes, because there was not enough supply to replace them every year.
- squigz 1y agoWeren't USSR products rather famously poorly built?
- codedokode 1y agoI saw still working after many years Soviet refrigerators, motorcycles and TV sets, so maybe they were built not that poorly after all. Of course there could be some survivorship bias, but generally modern (inexpensive) things seem to break earlier.
- pavel_lishin 1y agoI wonder if they just had a lot of repairs done to them, due to the unavailability of alternatives.
- sssilver 1y agoA lot of them were built like a tank. Their issue was lack of features, not lack of reliability.
- linksnapzz 1y agoDepends; they might not have had the most expensive materials available, or the trickiest assembly quality, but were often designed so that the inevitable repairs could be made quickly in the field by minimally-trained personnel. See: Zaporozhets 968 vs. Hillman Imp, AK-47 vs. AR-15, T-72 vs. M1.
- spyrja 1y agoI think "simple but rugged" would be a more apt description. Less moving parts than the US equivalent, easier to maintain, and usually fairly sturdy. On the other hand, since cost was a constant concern, Soviet equipment was generally not designed with aesthetics in mind. So "ugly but reliable" might be another way to put it!
- GMoromisato 1y agoMy favorite Six Million Dollar Man episode is where Steve Austin had to fight a Soviet Venus rover that accidently landed on Earth. It was autonomous, obviously, and because it was designed to survive on Venus, it was nearly indestructible. No one comes up with plots like that anymore!
- ggm 1y agoIts a dalek: Just climb stairs.
- oxryly1 1y agoAh I've been trying to dig up that episode from my faulty memory for years! I was convinced it was an episode of the A-Team fighting a killer tank instead.
- GMoromisato 1y agoGlad to help! I was 12 at the time, proving the adage about the "Golden Age of science fiction."
- oxryly1 1y agoAlso similar to the strange subplot in "Until the End of the World" [1] where a damaged Indian nuclear satellite threatens to fall to earth destroying civilization. [1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101458/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101458/
- sweetbacon 1y agowow that's an old movie call back I hadn't thought about in years. I loved the whole sub-plot of the repercussions of being able to record and replay ones dreams.
- bigyabai 1y ago> Wim Wenders' original rough cut for this film was twenty hours long. Holy hell
- ChuckMcM 1y agoI had the live tracking up and went to bed and apparently it fell out of the sky about 90 minutes later :-). I was hoping that if it started burning over North America I'd be able to go out and see it go over. Alas. I heard rumors that it had a Plutonium RTG on it for power, that would have been a bit spicy if it had splatted across the ground somewhere. Does anyone have any primary sources on whether or not that was the case?
- perihelions 1y agoThere's nothing to indicate there were radioisotope sources on this mission. Public information: [0] describes the six publicly-disclosed Soviet radioisotope launches up to 1989. (It's not a primary source; it's hard to find those). This one's not among them—none of the Venus missions were reported to use radioisotopes. This Kosmos 482[1] and the rest of the Soviet Venera program were publicly described as being solar-powered, which is evidence against any engineering need for other power sources. The landing probes themselves carried chemical batteries (they were very short-lived landers). Nothing I can find through search contradicts [0]. Wikipedia's list[2] is the same, and adds two more post-1989 launches. Seven radioisotope payloads have already reentered/crashed into Earth before—four Soviet or Russian and three American; some thermometric generators and some simple heaters; containing either polonium-210 or plutonium-238. That's not counting fission reactors, of which there are several in addition (I'm unclear the precise count of which nuclear reactors returned to Earth, or simply exploded in orbit; or what became of the latter group). [0] https://nuke.fas.org/space/sovspace.pdf https://nuke.fas.org/space/sovspace.pdf (Gary L. Bennett, "A look at the Soviet space nuclear power program" (1989)) [1] https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=1972-023A https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id... ("Two solar array wings, with an area of 2.5 meters, had a span of 4 meters. Due to the spacecraft's proximity to the Sun at Venus, the wings were only partially covered with solar cells".) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_systems_in_space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_systems_... ("List of nuclear power systems in space")
- shoo 1y agofascinating and disturbing -- i had no idea that there were fission powered satellites.
- azinman2 1y agoI’d love to know (up to a point) how flat earthers / firmament-die hard explain how a Soviet era satellite comes and crashes back on the planet.
- Waterluvian 1y agoThey always can. But I think it’s sometimes kind of interesting to see the creativity of trying to reconcile such an outlandish belief with the evidence.
- th0ma5 1y agoWell as always the belief is immutable, the evidence can only serve that belief and so if it doesn't it surely isn't evidence in that confused perspective.
- ArthurStacks 1y agoOh, they will think up something, and gullable useful idiots will continue to believe they actually believe that stuff, whilst they rake in the money from content engagement, laughing at the idiots trying to convince them the earth isnt flat for the 9000th time
- Muromec 1y agoNobody saw them falling, so no reason to explain fake news
- spartanatreyu 1y ago<sarcasm>Obviously it hit bounced off the sky dome and came back down.</sarcasm>
- Loughla 1y agoThey just say things like this didn't happen. It doesn't take creative writing skills to just call people you disagree with liars. It's very lazy overall.
- xchip 1y agoUSSR scientific accomplishments were amazing, and more considering the lack of resources they had, so bad many of their breakthroughs have been overshadowed or credited to people from other nationalities
- elzbardico 1y agoLack of resources is a bit of western propaganda. The USSR was during a very long time the second economy in the world.
- stevage 1y ago> Earth isn't the planet that Kosmos 482 was supposed to land on. Such a great line.
- pawanjswal 1y agoGuess Kosmos 482 finally decided Earth wasn’t such a bad backup plan after all!
- aaron695 1y ago[dead]
- keepamovin 1y agoIt’s funny that classified imaging platforms would definitely have tracked this reentry, but they’re gonna hold off on providing their data and maybe not going to provide it at all because it needs to be parallel constructed through non-classified capabilities. so it’s sort of like that submarine implosion incident where US Navy knew what happened immediately. They may have even notified people at that time. but I’m sure that US space force already exactly knows the trajectory of this object and probably the Russian corresponding agency does as well. but like the public has to wait for “open science” to reverse engineer where it might’ve been. It’s a funny Highlighting of the gap between public state-of-the-art and deployed capabilities that are not public.
- whycome 1y agoI'm still convinced that Luigi's capture happened via similar parallel construction. I suspect they knew where he was as soon as the crime occurred (or shortly thereafter). It also reminds me of the fact that the Titanic was only discovered because Robert Ballard funded the submersible robots via the US Navy looking for specific wrecks. https://spyscape.com/article/how-the-titanic-was-discovered-during-a-secret-cold-war-navy-mission#:~:text=Oceanographer%20Robert%20Ballard%20discovered%20the,was%20a%20purely%20scientific%20endeavor. https://spyscape.com/article/how-the-titanic-was-discovered-... > "The Navy never expected me to find the Titanic, and so when that happened, they got really nervous because of the publicity," Ballard told National Geographic. "But people were so focused on the legend of the Titanic they never connected the dots." https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/titanic-was-found-during-secret-cold-war-navy-mission https://www.nationalgeographic.com/premium/article/titanic-w... > Ballard met with the Navy in 1982 to request funding to develop the robotic submersible technology he needed to find the Titanic.
- keepamovin 1y agoYes and in general I think it's a good thing. It's a shame and a moral obscenity (and moral injury for the people staffing those systems) when they can see crimes or abuses but are unable to do anything due to "national security" (when such withholding seems to undermine it!). Good connecting of the dots with the Titanic! Interesting. Did not know that :)
- aunty_helen 1y agoI’ve held one of the fuel tanks that came back down around the launch. It was impressively thick and for a kid, very heavy. I sometimes think how much that would’ve weighed if it was standard iron and not titanium. It came down in a rural field in the south of New Zealand and the secretary of the primary school I went to was of the family that owned the field. It made a fun show and tell item. At the time no one knew what it was, and titanium was a classified material so they had to wait for the government to show up and then eventually after correspondence with the yanks gave it the all clear. People wondered if it was extraterrestrial and this wasn’t helped by finding two field mice huddled inside when it was recovered.
- donatj 1y agoI am usually an exceedingly rational person yet for some silly reason I had this creeping feeling for the last couple weeks I've known about the probes return that it was going to crash into my house and kill me. Very unlike me to think that way. The persistence of the thought itself kind of gave me the creeps. I can't explain it, it's absurd. The odds were astronomical in the truest sense of the word, and yet it did not happen and I am grateful.
- whatagreatboy 1y agoIt's very similar to people getting scared about SKylab so, you are not alone.
- notorandit 1y agoThe point is about how much control the launching entity has on those stranded space junk. I think in that very case it is zero with a good approximation. Imagine the probe was headed to a densely populated area. Then what? Nothing? Just pray hard? Relocate a million people beforehand? Rely on good luck?
- DonHopkins 1y ago[flagged]
- elzbardico 1y ago[flagged]