May 10 (UPI) – A spacecraft in the Soviet region that has orbited the earth for more than 50 years crashed in the Indian Ocean on Saturday, confirmed Russian officials.
“The Kosmos-482 spacecraft, launched in 1972, has ceased to exist, confusing and falling into the Indian Ocean”, the Russian State Space Corporation Roscosmos said about the Cloud Telegram social media platform.
The spacecraft hit the ocean around 9:24 am MST Saturday or 2:24 HAE.
“The descent of the spaceship was monitored by the automated warning system for dangerous situations in space near the earth,” according to the Roscosmos Post.
The spacecraft fell into the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, initially entering the planet's atmosphere at around 380 miles west of the islands in the middle of Andaman in the Andaman Sea.
The European Space Agency followed the satellite During Germany, shortly after 2 a.m., Hae on Saturday before disappearing from the radar.
In the spring of 1972, the Soviet Institute of Space Research launched Kosmos 482 in order to study and finally land on Venus.
“But due to a dysfunction of the recall block, he remained on a high elliptical orbit of the earth, gradually approaching the planet,” said Roscosmos in the post.
The spaceship was one of the many launched in order to study Venus under the Program will come from the Soviet era.
Scientists have long been curious about the similarities between Venus and the Earth.
Both The planets are considered “Geographically young” and have almost the same size and the same mass. In 2023, NASA scientists discovered volcanic activity on Venus, after looking at the photos taken from the planet in the 1990s by the Magellan robotic space probe.
Earlier that year, managers of the NASA jet propulsion laboratory discovered new geological models This gave an overview of how the planet releases heat.
