The Soviet space programme had a number of unmanned missions to Venus, several of which worked (and provided us with some really valuable science), many of which did not. Scott Manley has a new video out about one of these failures where one component of the spacecraft has been stuck in an elliptical orbit of Earth for the last 50 years. Drag in the upper atmosphere has shortened the orbit over that time, and now it looks like it will make reentry in a few days.
Apparently some educated speculation about which component this is suggests it might be the landing stage, which would have been designed to survive reentry in Venus’s much thicker atmosphere. If correct, that would mean it will almost certainly make it to Earth’s surface. Whether or not it survives contact with the ground is a topic of even more speculation.
So this spacecraft is going to slow down, survive entry, and then fall through the atmosphere like a rock and smash into the ground. Probably breaking apart like an egg; a giant, 500kg, Soviet space egg.
Get out your reinforced umbrellas, folks!
Manley’s breakdown is interesting and informative. Watch it here.
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