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Soviet Kosmos 482 spacecraft crashes into an unknown site on Earth


The craft was last detected over Germany and is believed to have completed an uncontrolled re-entry after a botched mission to Venus left it orbiting Earth for more than fifty years.

A Soviet spacecraft launched in 1972 on a failed mission to Venus is believed to have crashed back onto Earth early on Saturday morning. Over the following fifty-three years, the approximately three-foot wide, 1,069 pound spacecraft circled the Earth in an ever-smaller elliptical orbit, until it came close enough to fall into the planet's atmosphere. But Kosmos 482 was built to withstand a descent through Venus' dense atmosphere, and to operate on the planet's surface, where the mean temperature is 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 C).

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