The outbreak, The spacecraft in the Soviet era declines to Earth Not to be controlled, but experts say there is a great cause of warning.
The craft is designed half tons, known as Kosmos-482, to land on Venus, but instead spent the past 53 years in the Earth’s orbit due to a missile defect. Now the spacecraft is expected to fade in the air in the coming days, with the latest expectations that are expected to take the uncontrolled entry at some point on Saturday.
A large piece of minerals that belong to the Earth may seem a terrifying possibility, but old satellites, rocket parts or other small parts of space debris actually fall on the ground and re -enter the atmosphere on a daily basis, According to the European Space Agency (ESA).
In most cases, the spacecraft will burn without harmful in the air, with a very few parts – if any – alive on the fire journey. But even when some pieces with re -entering the air, it is very rare that it has fallen on the ground and caused any damage, mostly because the oceans cover about 71 % of the surface of the planet.
European Space Agency officials wrote in A. Blog post about Kosmos-482. “The annual risks of the individual person who was injured due to space debris is less than 1 in 100 billion. By comparison, the person is more likely to hit lightning about 65,000 times.”
The ESA spacecraft office expects that Kosmos-482 will start falling into the air on Saturday at about 4:26 am, East time, with uncertainty of excess or minus 4.35 hours.
It is difficult to make accurate predictions about when a spacecraft is not subject to control to the Earth because many of them depend on the dynamics of the atmosphere, space weather, and the specific orientation of the object with the decomposition of its orbit – all of this is difficult to model.
With the spacecraft approaching re -entering, researchers will be able to improve these predictions, but it is still difficult to know where the spacecraft will make the landing.
NASA said The landing site can be “anywhere between 52 n and 52 seconds”, which is a huge space that covers Africa, Australia, most North America, South America, large parts of Europe and Asia.
Satellite power officials said that their latest predictions show Kosmos-482 that re-introduces the atmosphere on the island of Borneo in Malaysia, near the border with Indonesia, while ESA’s ground track links the landing site southern Australia or in the southern ocean or around it.
Kosmos-482 was launched by the Soviet Union in 1972 on a mission to land on the surface of Venus. It was one of a series of tasks to Venus, but this task was cut off in orbit around the ground after a missile accident.
Most of the debris of the fateful mission has already returned to Earth decades ago, but it is a seeded landing capsule that is expected to return to Earth at some point this week.
Since the capsule, which has an area of about 3 feet, was designed to work on a hot Venus, it can escape the re-entry via the Earth’s atmosphere, according to Marco Langbrook, a scientist at Delpht University of Technology in the Netherlands, who was tracking Kosmos-482 and publishing online updates.
“You can survive the re -entering the Earth’s atmosphere intact, and a sound effect,” Langbroek Books in a post updated on Thursday. “It is likely that this is a difficult effect: I doubt that the umbrella spreading system will continue to operate after 53 years and with dead batteries.”
However, this does not mean that anyone on the ground will be in immediate danger.
“The risks concerned are not particularly high, but not zero: with a mass of just less than 500 kilograms and 1 meter, the risk is somewhat similar to those of the meteorite effect.”
This article was originally published on NBCNEWS.com
