Soviet-era Venus probe plunges back to Earth after 53 years
Soviet-era Venus probe plunges back to Earth after 53 years
A probe launched from the Soviet Union more than five decades ago has plummeted back to Earth, splashing down in the Indian Ocean. Kosmos 482 had been bound for Venus but never reached its destination.
A probe launched from the Soviet Union more than five decades ago has plummeted back to Earth, splashing down in the Indian Ocean. Kosmos 482 had been bound for Venus but never reached its destination.
Russian space agency Roscosmos on Saturday said a Soviet space probe that took off in March 1972 to explore the planet Venus crashed into the Indian Ocean.
Planetary lander Kosmos 482 never made it to Earth's sister planet because it was dragged off course after a malfunction in its launch vehicle's upper stage.
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Alternate headline: 50 year old Russian space junk falls back to earth.
Hey friend. Calling the Venera probes “junk” is selling them short. The Soviet Venus program pulled off some genuinely insane feats between the ’60s and early ’80s—basically the punch-card era of spaceflight.
- Venera 7 was the first spacecraft to land on another planet and send data back (1970).
- Venera 9 delivered the first photo taken from the surface of another planet (1975).
- Venera 13 survived 450°C heat and 90 atmospheres of pressure in 1982, long enough to send back color photos, audio from the surface, and a full soil analysis. No other country—not even now—has matched that on Venus.
All of this was done with computers running at 100–200 kHz and 8 KB of memory. For comparison, modern smartphones have 3–6 GB of RAM, multi-core CPUs clocking in at 2.5+ GHz, and literally millions of times the processing power. Your phone wouldn’t last five seconds on Venus. Venera 13 lasted 127 minutes.
Despite the harshest planetary environment we’ve ever targeted—900°F surface temps, atmospheric pressure like 3,000 feet underwater, and clouds of sulfuric fucking acid—the Venera program still racked up a list of milestones:
- First data from another planet’s atmosphere (Venera 4, 1967)
- First successful planetary landing (Venera 7, 1970)
- First photo from the surface of another planet – Venera 9
- First color image and audio from another planet (Venera 13, 1982)
- First soil analysis from Venus (Venera 13 again)
Here’s how their success rate compares to other space programs:
Program Missions Successes Failures Success Rate Notes Soviet Venera 28 15 13 ~54% First landings, first photos, audio, and soil data from Venus NASA Venus (Mariner) 5 3 2 60% All flybys—no landings NASA (modern planetary) Many ~75–85% Varies ~75–85% Achieved after decades of experience and tech refinement SpaceX (Falcon era) 300+ ~98% Few ~98% Mostly low Earth orbit and ISS missions, not planetary landings SpaceX has incredible reliability, but they’re launching commsats and resupply capsules—not trying to drop hardware onto a planet that eats spacecraft for breakfast. NASA has never returned data from the surface of Venus, not ever, despite multiple attempts. Mars is a far easier target in every possible way, and it still took decades to achieve consistent success.
Lest you think Venera’s 54% success rate was a sign of failure — it wasn't — it was a sign of pushing the boundaries of what was possible. They were first. They were bold. And they made history with kilobyte-level hardware and pressure vessels tougher than your car’s engine block.
This wasn’t junk. It was triumph.
Visual and audio proof:
This was an awesome post. Thank you
This guy space nerds.
A stage cut off too early and it failed to leave orbit. It has been derelict since 1972. It was junk.
Probe that could go easily in a Museum = Junk
These guys...
It must be very depressing to view the world with the amount of negativity that these cats do.
Sure, if you can get it down, let alone in one piece. It's unreachable and uncontrollable. It's a hazard to space navigation.
Well, it was, until it deorbited, anyway. Now it's returned to the dust it was made from. (I doubt any parts made it down intact.)
The lander most probably made it down in one piece. It was designed to survive an atmospheric entry on Venus and from interplanetary speeds. It almost certainly survived a reentry into Earth from a low orbit. That being said, it probably shattered in the splashdown due to the parachute not deploying.
From wikipedia:
The landing module, which weighed around 495 kilograms (1,091 lb), may have reached the surface of Earth largely intact. Correctly oriented, it was designed to withstand 300 g of acceleration and 100 atmospheres of pressure entering the atmosphere of Venus. However, the age of the craft and the shallow angle of reentry likely reduced survivability; tumbling or misorientation may have resulted in sections of the craft burning up in Earth's atmosphere. The final impact velocity was estimated to be 65–70 metres per second (230–250 km/h; 150–160 mph).
So maybe the main body of the landing module made it down, but it's extremely unlikely that it would have maintained the correct orientation. And any part that didn't burn up was surely obliterated in the impact.
That would be a headline about Russian army in Ukraine.