If you’ve been spending much of the last 24 hours inside a secure building fearing that a spent Soviet spacecraft part might land on your head, then the good news is that it’s safe to come out now.
The object — part of the Kosmos-482 spacecraft that launched 53 years ago — crashed to Earth at around 9:24 a.m. Moscow time (2:24 a.m. ET) on Saturday, according to the Russian space agency Roscosmos.
While there have been no eyewitness reports of the 1,000-pound part coming down, Roscosmos has said it believes the object landed in the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia.
Debris from spent rockets or satellites enters Earth’s atmosphere all the time, but most of it burns up before reaching our planet’s surface. Kosmos-482, however, was made of sterner stuff, as it had been designed to withstand the extreme pressure and heat of Venus, the planet where it was supposed to have landed just over 100 days after its launch back in 1972.
The Kosmos-482 mission was over shortly after it began, when a rocket malfunction during launch meant that it would never be able to reach its destination. After the vehicle’s upper stage failed to properly ignite, it remained trapped in a highly elliptical Earth orbit where it stayed for more than half a century before eventually reentering Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday.
While some folks may have had concerns about the great lump of metal landing on their head, the European Space Agency had tried to put things into perspective prior to its return, saying: “The risk of any satellite reentry causing injury is extremely remote. The annual risk of an individual human being injured by space debris is under 1 in 100 billion. In comparison, a person is about 65,000 times more likely to be struck by lightning.”
