Area in UK that could be affected as 50-year-old spaceship set to crash back to Earth anytime now

The wreckage of a Soviet spaceship that failed in its mission to reach Venus is due to crash back down to Earth any day now.

It's referred to as Kosmos 482 and was launched all the way back in 1972 with the intention of landing on Venus and transmitting some data before our harsh planetary neighbour destroyed it.

However, the probe never made it out of Earth's orbit and has been spending the past 53 years hurtling around the world as a constant failure.

Pretty soon it'll be coming back down to the ground, and it's hard to predict exactly when and where this piece of space debris will land.

Various estimations have put it somewhere around 10 May, give or take several hours, so it won't be long before it lands and strikes some part of our planet.

The Venera missions were designed to send spacecraft to Venus, Kosmos 482 failed to leave Earth's orbit (Sovfoto/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

While we have a pretty wide window of time, we also have a rather wide scope for location as well.

Dr Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer for the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told the New York Times that predicting an exact landing spot was pretty much impossible because we don't know the 'when'.

With Kosmos 482 hurtling around orbit at such speed even a few minutes variation in the time it actually hits will drastically change the impact site.

We do know that the spaceship's orbit puts it between 52 degrees north latitude and 52 degrees south latitude, which means a little bit of the UK is in the potential impact site.

Of the UK, only the south of England and Wales are at risk of being struck by Kosmos 482 and the potential landing site wraps all the way round the world.

It should also be noted that 52 degrees latitude south runs through the Falkland Islands, in case you were wondering how large the scope of impact could be.

Anything in the zone is at risk, so most of the UK has nothing to worry about (Getty Stock Image/LADbible)

Chances are it hits the sea, but just in case this hunk of space junk strikes ground we have a pretty clear idea of the damage it could do.

McDowell reckons there's about a '1 in 10,000' chance of Kosmos 482 actually hitting a person, and if it does hit something it'll likely have the same impact as a meteorite that exploded over Russia in 2013.

That did smash some buildings and shatter some windows, and the worst case scenario is that it basically hits something with the force of a truck smashing into it at around 50mph.

So it could destroy a car or a van, damage a house but would not cause widespread devastation.

Imagine how unlucky you'd be for this thing to land on your house.