Soviet-Era Spacecraft Expected to Plunge Uncontrolled to Earth Next Week
upstart writes:
A Soviet-era spacecraft meant to land on Venus in the 1970s is expected to soon plunge uncontrolled back to Earth.
It's too early to know where the half-ton mass of metal might come down or how much of it will survive re-entry, according to space debris-tracking experts.
Dutch scientist Marco Langbroek predicts the failed spacecraft will re-enter about 10 May. He estimates it will come crashing in at 150mph (242km/h), if it remains intact.
"While not without risk, we should not be too worried," Langbroek said in an email.
[...] Most of it came tumbling down within a decade. But Langbroek and others believe the landing capsule itself - a spherical object about 3ft (1 metre) in diameter - has been circling the world in a highly elliptical orbit for the past 53 years, gradually dropping in altitude.
It's quite possible that the 1,000lb-plus (nearly 500kg) spacecraft will survive re-entry. It was built to withstand a descent through the carbon dioxide-thick atmosphere of Venus, said Langbroek of Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
Experts doubt the parachute system would work after so many years. The heat shield may also be compromised after so long in orbit.
It would be better if the heat shield fails, which would cause the spacecraft to burn up during its dive through the atmosphere, Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said in an email. But if the heat shield holds, "it'll re-enter intact and you have a half-ton metal object falling from the sky".
The spacecraft could re-enter anywhere between 51.7 degrees north and south latitude, or as far north as London and Edmonton in Alberta, Canada, almost all the way down to South America's Cape Horn. But since most of the planet is water, "chances are good it will indeed end up in some ocean", Langbroek said.
In 2022, a Chinese booster rocket made an uncontrolled return to Earth and in 2018 the Tiangong-1 space station re-entered the Earth's atmosphere over the south Pacific after an uncontrolled re-entry.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.