“I’m not worried – I’m not telling all my friends to go to the basement for this,” said Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in orbit and monitors Kosmos-482 six times a day.
“Usually about once a week we have a large object reenter Earth’s atmosphere where some remnants of it will survive to the ground.”
When will Kosmos-482 come back to Earth?
Estimates change daily, but the predicted days of re-entry are currently this weekend.
One calculation of the window by The Aerospace Corp, a US-government supported non-profit that tracks space debris, suggests 1:37pm Saturday AEST – plus or minus 16 hours.
Marco Langbroek, a scientist and satellite tracker at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands who has tracked Kosmos-482 for years, puts the estimate closer to 5:51pm AEST, plus or minus about 20 hours.
Where will it land?
No one knows. “And we won’t know until after the fact,” McDowell said.
That’s because Kosmos-482 is hurtling through space at more than 27,000km/h, and it will be going that fast until atmospheric friction pumps the brakes.
So getting the timing wrong by even a half-hour means the spacecraft will re-enter more than half a world away, in a different spot.
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What’s known is that Kosmos-482’s orbit places it between 52 degrees north latitude and 52 degrees south latitude, which covers Africa, Australia, most of the Americas and much of south- and mid-latitude Europe and Asia.
“There are three things that can happen when something reenters: a splash, a thud or an ouch,” McKnight said.
“A splash is really good,” he said, and may be most likely because so much of Earth is covered in oceans. He said the hope was to avoid the “thud” or the “ouch”.
Will the spacecraft survive impact?
Assuming Kosmos-482 survives re-entry – and it should, as long as its heat shield is intact – the spacecraft will be going about 240km/h when it smashes into whatever it smashes into, Langbroek calculated.
“I don’t think there’s going to be a lot left afterward,” McDowell said. “Imagine putting your car into a wall at 150 miles an hour [241km/h] and seeing how much of it is left.”
The heat of re-entry should make Kosmos-482 visible as a bright streak through the sky if its return occurs over a populated area at night.
If pieces of the spacecraft survive and are recovered, they legally belong to Russia.
“Under the law, if you find something, you have an obligation to return it,” said Michelle Hanlon, executive director of the Centre for Air and Space Law at the University of Mississippi.
“Russia is considered to be the registered owner and therefore continues to have jurisdiction and control over the object.”
How do we know the identity of this object?
Some 25 years ago, McDowell was going through the North American Aerospace Defence Command’s catalogue of about 25,000 orbital objects and trying to pin an identity on each.
“Most of them, the answer is, ‘Well, this is a piece of exploded rocket from something fairly boring’,” he recalls.
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But one of them, object 6073, was a bit odd. Launched in 1972 from Kazakhstan, it ended up in a highly elliptical orbit, travelling between 200 and 10,000 kilometres from Earth.
As he studied its orbit and size, McDowell surmised it must be the wayward Kosmos-482 lander – not just a piece of debris from the failed launch.
The conclusion was supported by observations from the ground, as well as a recently declassified Soviet document.
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