The Kosmos-482 automated interplanetary station, launched in 1972 to study Venus, has returned to Earth, crashing into the Indian Ocean.
The EU Space Surveillance System (EU SST) and russia's Roscosmos reported this.
The spacecraft was launched into orbit by a Molniya-M launch vehicle, but due to a booster failure, it failed to reach an interplanetary trajectory. Since then, it has remained in low-Earth orbit for 53 years, slowly descending.
Unlike many other pieces of space debris that usually burn up in the atmosphere, Kosmos-482 had a titanium shell, a mass of about 500 kg and a diameter of 1 meter - according to EU SST experts, this allowed the spacecraft to reach the Earth's surface almost unscathed.
According to Roscosmos calculations, the station entered the atmosphere on May 10 at 9:24 (Kyiv time) west of the Andaman Islands and fell into the waters of the Indian Ocean, near Jakarta.
At the same time, independent researchers question the accuracy of this information. In particular, Dutch analyst Marco Langbroek noted that many people "without critical analysis" adopted the Roscosmos version, although the reliability of the calculations remains in question.
As a reminder, experts could not say exactly where the space station would fall, but they hoped that it would be the ocean.
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