It’s funny that classified imaging platforms would definitely have tracked this reentry, but they’re gonna hold off on providing their data and maybe not going to provide it at all because it needs to be parallel constructed through non-classified capabilities.
so it’s sort of like that submarine implosion incident where US Navy knew what happened immediately. They may have even notified people at that time.
but I’m sure that US space force already exactly knows the trajectory of this object and probably the Russian corresponding agency does as well. but like the public has to wait for “open science” to reverse engineer where it might’ve been.
It’s a funny Highlighting of the gap between public state-of-the-art and deployed capabilities that are not public.
The entire Soviet Union Venus missions are absolutely fascinating. "Hardening" takes on a whole new meaning when you're preparing a craft to survive mere minutes on Venus' surface. I'm a little surprised their deep sea craft never got much attention.
The other recent threads,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873531 ("Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry (leonarddavid.com)" — 291 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831602 ("After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth (gizmodo.com)" — 50 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43944167 ("Cosmos 482 Descent Craft tracker (utexas.edu)") — 9 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43942194 ("Cosmos-482 descent craft re-entry prediction (esa.int)") — 5 comments
I am usually an exceedingly rational person yet for some silly reason I had this creeping feeling for the last couple weeks I've known about the probes return that it was going to crash into my house and kill me. Very unlike me to think that way.
The persistence of the thought itself kind of gave me the creeps.
I can't explain it, it's absurd. The odds were astronomical in the truest sense of the word, and yet it did not happen and I am grateful.
I’ve held one of the fuel tanks that came back down around the launch. It was impressively thick and for a kid, very heavy. I sometimes think how much that would’ve weighed if it was standard iron and not titanium.
It came down in a rural field in the south of New Zealand and the secretary of the primary school I went to was of the family that owned the field. It made a fun show and tell item.
At the time no one knew what it was, and titanium was a classified material so they had to wait for the government to show up and then eventually after correspondence with the yanks gave it the all clear.
People wondered if it was extraterrestrial and this wasn’t helped by finding two field mice huddled inside when it was recovered.
Apparently it crashed near Java in the Indian Ocean [0]. Any news on retrieval efforts?
I had the live tracking up and went to bed and apparently it fell out of the sky about 90 minutes later :-). I was hoping that if it started burning over North America I'd be able to go out and see it go over. Alas.
I heard rumors that it had a Plutonium RTG on it for power, that would have been a bit spicy if it had splatted across the ground somewhere. Does anyone have any primary sources on whether or not that was the case?
> Earth isn't the planet that Kosmos 482 was supposed to land on.
Such a great line.
I’d love to know (up to a point) how flat earthers / firmament-die hard explain how a Soviet era satellite comes and crashes back on the planet.
Related:
Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873531 02-may-2025 280 comments
After 53 years, a failed Soviet Venus spacecraft is crashing back to Earth https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43831602 29-april-2025 46 comments
Soviet-era spacecraft plunges to Earth after 53 years stuck in orbit https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949025 10-may-2025 0 comments
A Soviet-era spacecraft built to land on Venus is falling to Earth instead https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43938644 09-may-2025 1 comment
Guess Kosmos 482 finally decided Earth wasn’t such a bad backup plan after all!
I wish we could push things like this into a higher orbit. High enough to not be a danger and to be preserved for future generations.
USSR scientific accomplishments were amazing, and more considering the lack of resources they had, so bad many of their breakthroughs have been overshadowed or credited to people from other nationalities
Paging Steve Austin:
[dead]
It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years. In USSR, unlike modern times, all products were made to last, like refrigerators, motorcycles, TV sets or clothes, because there was not enough supply to replace them every year.
My favorite Six Million Dollar Man episode is where Steve Austin had to fight a Soviet Venus rover that accidently landed on Earth. It was autonomous, obviously, and because it was designed to survive on Venus, it was nearly indestructible.
No one comes up with plots like that anymore!