After 53 years in orbit, failed Soviet lander crashes to Earth

The long space journey of a failed Soviet Venus lander is over. After orbiting our globe for over fifty years, the Kosmos 482 probe crashed to Earth on Saturday. 

According to Russia's space agency Roscosmos, the reentry took place over the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia, around 2:24am ET (0624GMT or 9:24am Moscow time). It looks like Kosmos 482 fell into the sea without causing any harm.

But that's only one estimate; other tracking groups and space agencies projected reentry points ranging from the eastern Pacific to the South Asian peninsula. We don't know if or when we'll find out for sure where Kosmos 482 went down.

As Kosmos 482 sailed over Rome, Italy just before daybreak on May 10, astronomer Gianluca Masi of the Virtual Telescope Project captured an image of the spacecraft during one of its last orbits. 

"Visible as a trail entering the field of view from the top and pointing to the bottom right corner," Masi said on his website, the probe is evident in the picture. "The picture is the sum of four images, this is why the trail of Cosmos 482 looks dashed."

The planet on which Kosmos 482 was intended to settle is not Earth. The spacecraft was a component of the Soviet Union's Venera programme, which in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s dispatched a fleet of probes to Venus.

In 1972, Kosmos 482 took off towards Earth's sweltering sister planet, but a rocket malfunction left the spacecraft stuck in an elliptical orbit around the planet. The probe was gradually dragged downward by atmospheric drag over the course of the following 53 years, culminating in the spectacular conclusion of today.

During their scorching journeys back to Earth, the majority of large pieces of space trash, such as expended rocket bodies and decaying satellites, break apart, producing man-made meteor showers.