Astronomer Jonathan McDowell warns that the decommissioned Soviet interplanetary probe “Cosmos-482” may crash to Earth between May 7 and 13.

According to his estimates, the car-sized object could likely survive atmospheric re-entry and reach the planet’s surface.

“In that case, I’d say there’s roughly a one-in-several-thousand chance it hits someone,” the scientist cautioned.

Originally launched by the USSR in March 1972, the “Cosmos-482” probe was intended to gather data from Venus’s hostile environment. However, a malfunction in one of its rocket boosters left the spacecraft stranded in Earth’s orbit.

On April 27, reports emerged that an international team of researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics made an unexpected discovery—a planet twice Earth’s size, yet orbiting at a distance greater than that from the Sun to Saturn (over 1.35 billion km). This newly found exoplanet belongs to the “super-Earth” category—worlds with masses between Earth and Neptune.

Earlier studies revealed that Earth-like planets likely orbit roughly one in every 300 Sun-like stars.