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After having closed the space for 53 years, a quirky Soviet spacecraft called Kosmos-482 returned to Earth and at 9:24 am Moscow Time entered the dense layers of the atmosphere of the planet on Saturday. According to RoscosmosThe Russian state -owned company that manages the space program.
Designed to land on the surface of Venus, Kosmos-482 may have remained intact during the dive. It splashed in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia, said Roscosmos.
Kosmos-482 was launched on March 31, 1972, but got stranded in the course of the earth after one of his rocket boosters was closed prematurely. The return of the spacecraft to the earth was a memory of the cold war competition that led to science fiction-like visions of earth-bound forces projected in the solar system.
“It recalls a time when the Soviet Union was adventurous in space – when we were all more adventurous in the room,” said Jonathan McDowellAn astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics following objects that have been launched in a job. “It’s a bit of a bittersweet moment in that sense.”
While America had won the race to the moon, the Soviet Union, through his Venera program, kept his sentences on Venus, the twisted sister of the earth.
From 1961 to 1984 the Soviets launched 29 spacecraft in the direction of the dressed world next door. Many of those missions have failed, but More than a dozen did not do that. The Vena spacecraft serge survivorized Venus from a job around the job, collected atmospheric observations while he caused them carefully through his toxic clouds, put soil samples and studied the first, and alone, photos that we have sent back from the surface of the planet.
“Kosmos-482 is a reminder that the Soviet Union reached the planet Venus 50 years ago. Here is a physical artifact of that project, from that time,” said Asif SiddiqiA historian at Fordham University who specializes in space from the Soviet era and scientific activities. “There is something strange strange and compelling for me about this about how the past is still turning around the earth.”
Half a century later, while Nations plot a return to the moon and throw their probes to Mars, Jupiter and various asteroids, A lonely Japanese spacecraft Is the only vehicle around Venus. Have other proposed missions Conflicted delays And uncertain futures.
During the Space Race, placing boots on the moon was the largest price – but the other worlds in our solar system also called. While the United States was increasingly focusing on Mars, the Soviet Union focused its sights on the second rock of the sun.
“Both parties were interested in Mars at that time, but Venus was an easier target,” said Cathleen LewisCurator of international space programs and space suits in the National Air & Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution.
Almost the same size as the earth, Venus is often called his twins, although it is about as unrecognizable as getting rocky planets. It is covered in a thick atmosphere of carbon dioxide and hidden among miles of sulfuric acid clouds. A victim of a runaway cheese effect, the Venusian surface is a sizzling 870 degrees Fahrenheit, and crushed by atmospheric pressure about 90 times larger than that of the earth.
“How do you build something that can survive a multimonth trip over the solar system, reach a planet through a thick atmosphere, take the ground and not melt or be crushed and take pictures?” Asked Dr. Siddiqi. “It is a kind of incredible problem to think about solving in the sixties.”
Anxiously because of the challenges of such a punitive world, the Soviets always swing their hardware to Venus. And there was no template to do it at the time.
“You literally invented the thing you want to send to Venus,” said Dr. Siddiqi. “Nowadays, if a country like Japan would like to send something to Venus, they have 50 years of manuals and technical manuals. In the 1960s you had nothing.”
The Soviet Venera program achieved a number of superlatives: the first probes to enter the atmosphere of another planet, the first spacecraft that safely land on another planet, the first to record the sounds of an alien landscape.
The Kosmos-482 failure took place during the middle of that timeline. And the reintroduction on Saturday was not the first meeting of the earth with the intended Venus Lander.
Around 1 o’clock local time on 3 April 1972, just a few days after the troubled launch, the city of Ashburton, New Zealand, was visited by a few titanium balls of 30 pounds, each the size of a beach ball and marked with Cyrillic letters.
One ended up in a turnip field that alerted the local citizens. The Nieuw -Zeelandse Herald reported that in 2002 One of the bulbs “was eventually locked up in a police cell in Ashburton because nobody knew what to do with it.”
Although Space Law indicates that the ownership of a crashed space object remains with the country that it has launched, the Soviets did not claim the bulbs at that time. The “space balls” were eventually returned to The farmers they found.
And while Kosmos-482 was lost, his brother or sister, who had been launched a few days earlier, eventually landed on Venus, Venera 8. That spacecraft survived and sent data from the surface for 50 minutes. Two years later, when Venera 9 and 10 arrived – for the Soviets, the construction in redundancy meant to launch two of everything – they slowly descended through the clouds, touched the surface of the planet and shine images of an abandoned, yellowish world.
The Venera program ended in the mid-1980s with the ambitious Vega probes. Those missions launched in 1984 dropped landers on the Venusian surface in 1985 and flew through Halley’s Comet in 1986.
“The legacy of the 70s and 80s of Soviet exploration of Venus was a point of pride for the USSR,” said Dr. Lewis.
The Kosmos-482-Re-entry, although unique for historical reasons, is not so unusual. Nowadays, countries and companies are launching even more hardware in a job around the earth, so that no shortage of objects remains from the air.
“Reins are now very frequent,” said Greg HenningAn engineer and space puine expert at the Aerospace Corporation, a federally supported non -profit organization that follows objects in a job to the job. “We see them dozens a day. They usually go unnoticed.”
This is especially the case at the present moment, when the sun is pretty active, because increased solar activity browses up the atmosphere of the earth and the resistance on a job in a job enlarges around the track.
Some of those reins on spectacular light shows. They can be the result of controlled plums back to earth, such as those of SpaceX’s cargo and crew capsules. Others are coincidental, such as the failed test flights of SpaceX’s Starship -Prototypes. And others are deliberately uncontrolled and potentially quite dangerous, as has been the case China’s long rocket on March 5 Boosters, objects that are large enough to cause significant problems when they go into a populated area again.
But in rare cases, an object like Cosmos-482 will return to the earth as a report of the first steps of humanity in the space that increases the earth.
“There is an archive of the Space Race, which is still circling around the earth. There are so many things that were launched in the 1950s, 1960, 1970,” said Dr. Siddiqi. “Sometimes we are reminded that there is a museum because it falls on our head.”
Jonathan Wolfe contributed reporting.
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