Half-tonne piece of Soviet rocket may have crashed through atmosphere over south of England

A car-sized piece of Soviet rocket has crashed back through the atmosphere, after 53 years in orbit.

Scientists haven't yet pinpointed its location but one organisation has predicted it had re-entered over southern England early on Saturday morning. It is not immediately known how much of the rocket survived the blazing hot descent, with scientists suggesting it had burned up or broken up at the last minute, sometime between around 7am and 8.30am.

Cosmos 482 launched in 1972 and been set to land on Venus but it became trapped in orbit after a stage of the mission failed. Scientists tracking the lander as it finally began to fall to Earth believe it decayed as it re-entered the atmosphere.

EU Space Surveillance and Tracking posted on X saying it "decayed within the last estimated re-entry window". The European Space Agency said the craft didn't appear on radars in Wachtberg, Germany, suggesting "reentry occurred [...] between 06:04 UTC and 07:32 UTC".

However, the six major space organisations tracking the re-entry have placed it anywhere from over the Atlantic to Germany and even Australia, with astronomer Dr Marco Langbroek mapping their predictions. He says EU Space Surveillance and Tracking has calculated it crashed through the atmosphere above the south of England.

Cosmos 482 lifted off from the USSR's spaceport in what is now Kazakhstan during the Soviet era. The upper stage of the rocket, which was responsible for powering it out of orbit, failed.

"The upper stage didn't work right and it left just the probe in orbit around the Earth," said Smithsonian astronomer Jonathan McDowell. Parts of the rocket re-entered the Earth's atmosphere in the 1980s but one chunk remained in orbit, which was thought to be debris left from the spacecraft.

"Years later, I went and looked at the data and went, 'This debris [...] stayed up a lot longer than the other stuff. It seems to be denser.

It's not behaving like debris," said Mr McDowell. "I realised that it was the Venus entry capsule from Cosmos 482, which has got a heat shield on it [strong enough] to survive the crushing force of Venus's atmosphere." Mr McDowell.

said it weighed about "half a tonne" and was "about three feet across". "As it smashes into the atmosphere, going at this enormous speed, the energy gets converted into heat [and] you get this fireball." If it hit the Earth, Mr McDowell said Cosmos 482 would be "going only a couple of hundred miles an hour".

"But it's still a half-tonne thing falling out of the sky at a couple of hundred miles an hour. That's going to hurt if it hits you," he said.

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