What to Know About the Soviet Spacecraft Plunging to Earth
Time was, the Soviet Union fairly owned Venus. From 1961 to 1983, the U.S.'s old space race rival launched 16 probes, Venera 1 through Venera 16, that either flew by, orbited, or landed on Venus—with three of them failing en route. It's been decades since the Russians bothered with Venus, but this week, an artifact from that long-ago space program may very well bother us: Sometime between May 9 and May 11, an 1,100-lb Venus spacecraft known as Kosmos 482, which has been stuck in Earth orbit since 1972, will come crashing back to the ground, potentially threatening anyone on Earth living between 52° North and 52° South of the equator—which covers the overwhelming share of us. Here's what you need to know.
Kosmos 482 was originally intended to be known as Venera 9. It was launched on March 31, 1972, just four days after its sister probe, Venera 8. That ship had a brief but glorious life. It arrived at Venus on July 22, 1972, spent close to an hour descending through the atmosphere, and landed at 6:24 a.m. local Venus time. (Local time on another world is calculated the same way it is on Earth—by measuring the angle of the sun relative to the meridians, or lines of longitude.)
Once on the ground, Venera 8 lived for only 63 minutes, which is about what was expected given Venus's hellish conditions. The atmospheric pressure is 93 times greater than it is on Earth, with a sea level pressure of 1,350 pounds per square inch (psi) compared to just 14.7 psi here. The air is mostly carbon dioxide, which, together with Venus's greater proximity to the sun, means an average temperature 860°F—or more than 200 degrees hotter than the melting point of lead.
That was the future that awaited Venera 9 too, but things didn't work out for what turned out to be a snakebit ship. After reaching Earth orbit, it fired its engine to enter what is known as a Venus transfer trajectory; that engine burn went awry, however, either cutting off too soon or not reaching a sufficient thrust to send the spacecraft on its way. Instead, it remained in an elliptical Earth orbit, with an apogee, or high point, of 560 miles, and a perigee, or low point, of 130 miles. There it has remained for the past 53 years. For its pains, Venera 9 lost not only its mission but its name. Abiding by Soviet-era nomenclature rules, spacecraft that remain in orbit around the Earth are dubbed Kosmos, followed by a number—in this case, Kosmos 482.
In 2022, Marco Langbroek, a Dutch archaeologist who toggled over to sky watching mid-career and now lectures on space situational awareness at The Netherlands' Delft Technical University, completed a round of tracking Kosmos 482's orbit. In The Space Review, he wrote that the object would reenter Earth's atmosphere sometime in 2025 or 2026, due to the steady accumulation of drag by the atmosphere's upper reaches. Further tracking of the spacecraft's trajectory—by Langbroek, NASA, and the nonprofit Aerospace Corporation—now predicts the reentry will occur on May 10, at 12:42 a.m., plus or minus 19 hours.
'The reentry is an uncontrolled reentry,' Langbroek wrote on his website on April 24. 'It likely will be a hard impact. I doubt the parachute deployment system will still work after 53 years and with dead batteries.'
Medallion which was delivered to the surface of planet Venus by the soviet space probe Venera 3 on March 1, 1966.
Universal Images Group—Getty
Ordinarily, even a spacecraft as big as Kosmos 482 would not pose much danger to people on the ground. The same atmospheric friction that causes most meteors to burn up before they reach the surface disposes of errant satellites the same way. It is mostly far larger objects, like the U.S.'s Skylab space station—which reentered in July, 1979, scattering debris across the Australian outback—that cause concern. But Kosmos 482 is different; it was intentionally designed to withstand Venus's pressure-cooker atmosphere, and even colliding with our own atmosphere at orbital speeds of 17,500 miles per hour, it could at least partly survive its plunge.
'The risks involved are not particularly high, but not zero,' Langbroek writes. 'With a mass of just under 500 kg and 1-meter size, risks are somewhat similar to that of a meteorite impact.'
All of the land masses in Earth's southern hemisphere are within the reentry footprint, along with the large majority of the north. Most of Russia, the U.K. the Balkans, Scandinavia, Canada, and Alaska are among the few places out of harm's way.
Still, nobody is recommending calling the pets inside and crouching in fallout shelters. More than 70% of the Earth's surface is water, meaning a 70% chance of a splashdown as opposed to a hard landing. What's more, the landmasses in the reentry zone include largely unpopulated areas like the Sahara, Atacama, and Australian deserts.
It would, of course, be best if Kosmos 482 disintegrates entirely on reentry, but space sentimentalists are hoping that at least a bit of it survives. Venera probes, like all of the Soviet spacecraft sent to the moon and the planets, carried along with them small memorial coins, medals and titanium pennants—embossed with the hammer and sickle, the likeness of Lenin, the Earth, and more. Kosmos 482 will return to a world very different from the one it left—with the Soviet Union itself consigned to history. This week, after more than half a century, a bit of commemorative metal just may survive the empire that sent it aloft.
Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
National Geographic
a day ago
- National Geographic
Could T. rex swim? Kinda
Evidence suggests dinosaurs like tyrannosaurs were probably best suited to a version of the doggy paddle. Despite what's depicted in movies and books, the real Tyrannosaurus rex was likely an awkward swimmer at best. Illustration by Fotokita, Getty Images When Michael Crichton released the novel Jurassic Park in 1990, he included a terrifying chase through one of the park's ponds. Fictional paleontologist Alan Grant, looking after kids Lex and Tim, tries to sneak by a dozing Tyrannosaurus rex and motor across a lake away from the dinosaur. The T. rex follows, swimming after them like 'the biggest crocodile in the world.' The scene stood out so much that it's been revamped for the new movie Jurassic World: Rebirth. But while tyrannosaurs might swim in movies and books, could they swim in real life? Carnivorous dinosaurs are not generally thought of as good swimmers. During much of the 20th century, in fact, paleontologists wrongly assumed that herbivorous dinosaurs ran into rivers and lakes to avoid the jaws of T. rex, Allosaurus, and other predators. No one had found any direct evidence that such carnivores could swim. But the discovery of dinosaur swim tracks at fossil sites around the world have indicated that theropod dinosaurs—the group that contains T. rex, birds, and their relatives—were more aquatically adept than suspected and may have even done their own version of the doggy paddle. At one 200 million-year-old fossil site in southern Utah, paleontologists have found over 2,500 scratches and traces made by small carnivorous dinosaurs swimming across a Jurassic lake. Over 120 million years ago, a larger theropod dinosaur swam through the shallows in what's now La Rioja, Spain. Another fossil site found in La Rioja has even allowed paleontologists to begin distinguishing between different types of swimming traces left by theropods kicking through the water, indicating that swimming was not unusual for feathery, sharp-toothed dinosaurs. To date, no one has found swim traces from a tyrannosaur. Paleontologists have found some rare tyrannosaur footprints, but not direct evidence of swimming. Still, University College London paleontologist Cassius Morrison notes, today, 'the majority of animals can swim' even without specific aquatic adaptations, and the fossil evidence of other swimming theropods suggests that big tyrannosaurs could, too. The question is how they would have done it. (Could dinosaurs swim? This fossil revives an age-old debate.) What did tyrannosaur swimming look like? Mature T. rex were very large animals. The biggest reached more than 40 feet in length and weighed over nine tons. Hefty as that is, however, nine tons is relatively light for such a big animal. The secret is that tyrannosaurs, like many dinosaurs, had a complex system of air sacs that branched out from its respiratory system and infiltrated the dinosaur's bones, just like in birds today. The air sacs allowed the dinosaur to be a little lighter without sacrificing strength, allowed the animal to breathe more efficiently, and, in the water, to float a little more easily. Magazine for all ages starting at $25/year The effects of dinosaur air sacs on swimming ability has been underscored by the bones of another giant carnivore and Jurassic Park alum—the croc-snouted, sail-backed Spinosaurus. While researchers debate how much time the paddle-tailed dinosaur spent in the water, fossil evidence suggests it had extra-dense bones. These heavier bones helped the dinosaur avoid being too buoyant, so that it could more easily use its muscle power to move through the water rather than actively working to stay submerged like we do when we go under water with lungs full of air. (Read more about Spinosaurus' penguin-like bones.) Spinosaurus had a skeleton adapted to dealing with the buoyancy of the air sacs, but other dinosaurs without such dense bones would have only been capable of a more unstable doggy paddle. Giant long-necked dinosaurs, for example, have been described as 'tipsy punters' that were relatively unstable in the water and could kick off the bottom but not swim the way a crocodile does. For the same reason, T. rex probably wouldn't be able to completely disappear beneath a lake's surface and burst out with open jaws, like in the movies. And even though the dinosaur's arms were too small and lacked the range of motion for a swim stroke, the same is true of many other carnivorous dinosaurs that left swim traces behind. The emerging picture is that T. rex was probably a strong, if unsteady, swimmer. The available evidence hints that a swimming T. rex would float near the surface of a body of water, using its powerful legs to kick along to cross. Did T. rex stalk prey in the water? T. rex's swimming abilities would have inevitably shaped its hunting strategy. In 2023, University of the Republic of Uruguay paleontologist R. Ernesto Blanco modeled how quickly T. rex could move through the water. He proposed that the tyrant lizard would have been too slow to catch prey like the duckbill Edmontosaurus and the ostrich-like Struthiomimus on dry land but could move faster while wading or swimming in shallow water. 'Depending on the water depth, T. rex would have different ways of propulsion,' Blanco says. In deep enough water, T. rex could have swum with most of its body under the surface, but more often the dinosaur likely waded or 'punted' off the bottom as the swim traces of other theropods indicate. Perhaps, Blanco suggested, T. rex preferred to hunt along shorelines where herbivores trying to escape in the water would have been slowed down and more vulnerable. Other experts are not yet convinced that T. rex preferred hunting and feeding along shorelines. The bulk of the evidence so far points to the reptiles ambushing prey on land and breaking any carcasses it could find down into splinters with its impressive jaw strength. Finding swim traces, tyrannosaur poop with aquatic animal remains, or other fossil evidence could help test the idea further. Nevertheless, splashing around in the water seems within the range of what T. rex could do during its Cretaceous days. Swimming—even awkwardly—was a useful ability in ancient lowland habitats that likely resembled the wetlands and swamps along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico today. Being able to cross such waterways and wet habitats would have been advantageous to big tyrannosaurs, and it's likely the dinosaurs did so at times. 'With current evidence available to us,' Morrison says, 'I would suggest that swimming may have been a way for Tyrannosaurus to navigate its environment.' The answer to why T. rex crossed the lake, in other words, may have been that lunch was on the other side.
New York Post
2 days ago
- New York Post
US states with the highest dementia rates revealed — did yours make the list?
Home is where the heart is — but it also might be where your memory slips away. A sweeping new study found that dementia rates vary drastically across the US in ways that can't be explained by traditional risk factors. The research suggests that where you live could play a significant role in whether you develop the memory-robbing disease later in life, opening new doors for targeted prevention efforts. 3 One in 10 Americans ages 65 and older is living with dementia. Getty Images/iStockphoto Dementia is a growing public health concern that affects more than 6 million Americans and causes over 100,000 deaths each year, according to the National Institutes of Health. Looking ahead, researchers predict new dementia cases in the US will double over the next 40 years — increasing from roughly 514,000 in 2020 to nearly 1 million by 2060. That means Americans over 55 face a 42% lifetime risk of being diagnosed. But could your zip code hold the key to lowering those odds? Dementia hot spots Researchers at UC San Francisco (UCSF) analyzed health data from more than 1.2 million veterans aged 65 and older, courtesy of the Veterans Health Administration. Over an average of 12 years, the team tracked who developed the disease — then compared the numbers by location. The Mid-Atlantic had the lowest dementia rate, with just 11.2 cases per 1,000 people annually. But other parts of the country saw significantly higher risks: The Southeast — Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi — had a 25% higher dementia diagnosis rate compared to the Mid-Atlantic. The Northwest and Rocky Mountains were 23% higher. The South saw an 18% increase. The Southwest trailed with a 13% higher rate. The South Atlantic and Midwest regions were about 12% higher. The Northeast and Great Lakes had a 7% increase. Notably, the regional differences couldn't be explained when researchers factored in common risk factors like age, race, heart disease or rural versus urban living. 3 The biggest risk factor for dementia is aging, but where you live also might play a role. Monkey Business – The study does have some limitations. The authors only looked at veterans, who are mostly male and may not reflect the general population. This group also faces unique risks, like traumatic brain injury and PTSD, which could impact their odds. Still, the results were clear: where you live matters. 'The study underscores the need to understand regional differences in dementia and the importance of region-specific prevention and intervention efforts,' Dr. Kristine Yaffe, senior author of the study and director of the Center for Population Brain Health at UCSF, said in a statement. Next, the researchers aim to uncover what's driving these geographic gaps. 'Quality of education, early life conditions and environmental exposures may be key factors,' said Dr. Christina Dintica, first author of the study and a UCSF postdoctoral scholar. Fight back against forgetting While UCSF digs into why some places have higher dementia rates, you don't have to wait to protect your brain. 3 Lifestyle changes like more physical activity could help prevent dementia. Kay Abrahams/ – Studies suggest that nearly 45% of dementia cases can be prevented or delayed — with experts outlining five simple steps you can take right now to lower your risk. First, get moving. Regular physical activity doesn't just keep your body in shape — it sharpens your mind too. Aim for 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity a week, plus muscle-strengthening sessions twice weekly. Beyond exercise, managing your health is crucial. Preventing or controlling diabetes is key because too much sugar in your blood can damage vital organs — including your brain. Along those lines, keeping your blood pressure under control is equally important. High blood pressure harms blood vessels and cuts blood flow to the brain, increasing your risk of stroke and memory loss. Your hearing also plays a role. Taking steps to prevent hearing loss — or getting treatment if you already have it — matters because hearing loss can make your brain work harder, draining resources needed for memory and thinking. Finally, try to limit or avoid drinking and smoking. Excessive alcohol can cause high blood pressure and brain injury, while smoking increases the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Today's AI Could Make Pandemics 5 Times More Likely
Credit - Getty Images Recent developments in AI could mean that human-caused pandemics are five times more likely than they were just a year ago, according to a study of top experts' predictions shared exclusively with TIME. The data echoes concerns raised by AI companies OpenAI and Anthropic in recent months, both of which have warned that today's AI tools are reaching the ability to meaningfully assist bad actors attempting to create bioweapons. Read More: Exclusive: New Claude Model Triggers Bio-Risk Safeguards at Anthropic It has long been possible for biologists to modify viruses using laboratory technology. The new development is the ability for chatbots—like ChatGPT or Claude—to give accurate troubleshooting advice to amateur biologists trying to create a deadly bioweapon in a lab. Safety experts have long viewed the difficulty of this troubleshooting process as a significant bottleneck on the ability of terrorist groups to create a bioweapon, says Seth Donoughe, a co-author of the study. Now, he says, thanks to AI, the expertise necessary to intentionally cause a new pandemic 'could become accessible to many, many more people.' Between December 2024 and February 2025, the Forecasting Research Institute asked 46 biosecurity experts and 22 'superforecasters' (individuals with a high success rate at predicting future events) to estimate the risk of a human-caused pandemic. The average survey respondent predicted the risk of that happening in any given year was 0.3%. Crucially, the surveyors then asked another question: how much would that risk increase if AI tools could match the performance of a team of experts on a difficult virology troubleshooting test? If AI could do that, the average expert said, then the annual risk would jump to 1.5%—a fivefold increase. What the forecasters didn't know was that Donoughe, a research scientist at the pandemic prevention nonprofit SecureBio, was testing AI systems for that very capability. In April, Donoughe's team revealed the results of those tests: today's top AI systems can outperform PhD-level virologists at a difficult troubleshooting test. Read More: Exclusive: AI Outsmarts Virus Experts in the Lab, Raising Biohazard Fears In other words, AI can now do the very thing that forecasters warned would increase the risk of a human-caused pandemic fivefold. (The Forecasting Research Institute plans to re-survey the same experts in future to track whether their view of the risks has increased as they said it would, but said this research would take months to complete.) To be sure, there are a couple of reasons to be skeptical of the results. Forecasting is an inexact science, and it is especially difficult to accurately predict the likelihood of very rare events. Forecasters in the study also revealed a lack of understanding of the rate of AI progress. (For example, when asked, most said they did not expect AI to surpass human performance at the virology test until after 2030, while Donoughe's test showed that bar had already been met.) But even if the numbers themselves are taken with a pinch of salt, the authors of the paper argue, the results as a whole still point in an ominous direction. 'It does seem that near-term AI capabilities could meaningfully increase the risk of a human-caused epidemic,' says Josh Rosenberg, CEO of the Forecasting Research Institute. The study also identified ways of reducing the bioweapon risks posed by AI. Those mitigations broadly fell into two categories. The first category is safeguards at the model level. In interviews, researchers welcomed efforts by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to prevent their AIs from responding to prompts aimed at building a bioweapon. The paper also identifies restricting the proliferation of 'open-weights' models, and adding protections against models being jailbroken, as likely to reduce the risk of AI being used to start a pandemic. The second category of safeguards involves imposing restrictions on companies that synthesize nucleic acids. Currently, it is possible to send one of these companies a genetic code, and be delivered biological materials corresponding to that code. Today, these companies are not obliged by law to screen the genetic codes they receive before synthesizing them. That's potentially dangerous because these synthesized genetic materials could be used to create mail-order pathogens. The authors of the paper recommend labs screen their genetic sequences to check them for harmfulness, and for labs to implement 'know your customer' procedures. Taken together, all these safeguards—if implemented—could bring the risk of an AI-enabled pandemic back down to 0.4%, the average forecaster said. (Only slightly higher than the 0.3% baseline of where they believed the world was before they knew today's AI could help create a bioweapon.) 'Generally, it seems like this is a new risk area worth paying attention to,' Rosenberg says. 'But there are good policy responses to it.' Write to Billy Perrigo at
