Colorado scientist tracks Earthly plunge of a wayward Soviet-era Venus space probe

Predictions for the Earthly plunge of a wayward Soviet era Venus space probe are narrowing as the old spacecraft is expected to crash back to Earth Friday night.

"It's a fun event. And we really care about the research we do. And we find that such an interesting space event can kind of help highlight our research, and why we do what we do," said CU Boulder educated Aerospace Engineering Ph.D Dr. Shaylah Mutschler.
Dr. Mutschler is director of the Space Weather Division as Space Environment Technologies. Space weather is different from atmospheric weather. It is affected by the sun's coronal mass ejections and solar flares.

"And what happens is when events like that happen at the sun, some of them come out towards the Earth and interact with the Earth's magnetic field. And that inflates the atmosphere around Earth," said Dr. Mutschler. That perturbs solar orbits. When solar orbits shift, it can put some of the roughly 27,000 tracked objects orbiting Earth on a collision course.

Mutschler and her colleagues follow the movement of about a hundred so-called, calibration satellites. The falling satellite, Kosmos 482 is one of them.

"So these are defunct satellites. That means they're not maneuvering. They're just free orbiting. So when we are able to observe changes in their orbit, we can then invert those measurements to extract information about the environment that they're orbiting through." That helps them create space weather predictions.

The return of Kosmos 482, once destined for Venus, is an opportunity to talk about space weather.

"It's an avenue for us to talk about space, weather, and satellite operations. and how our space weather models are not perfect, which is why we don't know with perfect certainty when and where the satellite is going to re-enter."

By Friday evening, experts were narrowing their prediction of a re-entry window of about three hours before and three hours after after 12:30am Saturday. They have drawn a wide swath of a potential re-entry path that incorporates little of the United States. But significant portions of Australia, India, China and Europe remained in the possible path.

The spacecraft was launched in 1972. It was to land on the surface of Venus, but failed to escape Earth's orbit due to a rocket failure.

That put it on an odd orbit that is actually very close to Earth at times. Among the closest of paths said Dr. Mutschler. Much of the rocket shredded in the failure, but a half-ton titanium shielded three-foot donut looking craft remains. It's plenty sturdy because it was designed to withstand the high temperatures and pressures of Venus.

"So Earth is kind of a walk in the park compared to Venus," said Dr. Mutschler. It is not expected to break apart much. Seeing it is questionable, especially due to it's predicted path.

But the chances of a person getting hit by its plunge remain very, very low. Still Dr. Mutschler said she'd miss it.

"It's honestly one of my favorites."