Astronomer McDowell: Soviet spacecraft “Kosmos-482” may crash into Earth in May

The decommissioned Soviet automatic interplanetary station “Kosmos-482” could fall to Earth between May 7 and 13, astronomer Jonathan McDowell wrote in his blog.

According to his data, the car-sized object “has a good chance of surviving atmospheric reentry and reaching Earth’s surface.”

“In that case, I estimate there’s roughly a one-in-several-thousand chance it could hit someone,” the scientist warned.

Launched by the USSR in March 1972, the “Kosmos-482” probe was intended to study Venus’s hostile surface. But due to a malfunction in one of its rocket boosters, the spacecraft remained stranded in Earth’s orbit.

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

Earlier studies revealed that Earth-like planets may exist around roughly one in 300 Sun-like stars.