Featured Image Credit: ESA
Topics: Space, World News, UK News
Anish Vij
A 50-year-old spaceship is set to crash back down to Earth next week and a space expert has revealed what the worst-case scenario looks like.
The Kosmos 482, a Soviet lander probe, was intended to land on Venus after it was launched on 31 March 1972.
As part of the Venera program, the mission ultimately failed due to a premature cutoff of the rocket burn, which prevented it from escaping the Earth's orbit.
Instead of heading to Venus, the 495kg descent module has basically been orbiting over us for 53 years, as NASA now expect it to reenter Earth's atmosphere between 7 May and 13 May.
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And the potential reentry zone spans latitudes between 52°N and 52°S, covering the UK, much of Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas.
DPhil Shubham Kulkarni of the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford has provided a worst-case scenario if the probe was to crash into the UK capital.
He told LADbible: "Scientists at TU Delft, Marco Langbroek and Dominic Dirkx, have determined that the velocity at impact would be 155 miles/hr.
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"With this velocity, I estimate that the impact from a 480 kg satellite would release energy equivalent to about ¼ kg of TNT."
Kulkarni says the possible impact 'is similar to the impact of a large delivery van colliding with an object at approximately 50 miles/hr'.
"So if it falls on a small car or a van, it would surely destroy it," he explained.
"If it falls on the house, it can destroy a room in a house, but the impact would be rather small."
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The scientist insists that 'we don't need to panic and this is the worst case scenario'.
"It's highly unlikely that this would happen. But even if this happens, the damage would be localised," the researcher added.
Kulkarni predicts that the most likely landing location is expected to be in the ocean, or a sparsely populated area.
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"So the most likely scenario is that somewhere around the world, some city, would see a bright fireball going over them, and then it would hit the water or uninhabited land," the scientist said.
"71 percent of Earth's surface is covered by water or oceans, as we see with a lot of entries that it will most likely go into the ocean."
Whilst the spacecraft is thought to be robust enough to survive reentry, there is also a chance it may disintegrate due to high ablation, Kulkarni says.