MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
We have an update on the Soviet spacecraft that fell back to Earth.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Kosmos 482 was originally headed to Venus. Instead, it spent more than half a century orbiting this planet. On Saturday, it came down over the Indian Ocean, according to Russia's space agency.
MARTIN: Jonathan McDowell is an astronomer with the Center for Astrophysics. That's a collaboration between Harvard and the Smithsonian. While this piece of space junk was unusual, McDowell says there's more to come.
JONATHAN MCDOWELL: There's an awful lot of stuff left over from the Cold War orbiting the Earth, some of which is going to eventually come back down and reenter.
FADEL: A lot of that junk burns up in the atmosphere, but this spacecraft had a heat shield made for conditions on Venus, and it was coming down uncontrolled, a crash landing, so it got attention as a potential danger to people.
MCDOWELL: Imagine, you know, dropping a small car from the top of a skyscraper. What's going to be left after it hits is going to be a bunch of mangled metal. And you better hope that no one's underneath.
MARTIN: Luckily, it fell over the ocean, although that may be inconvenient for scientists. McDowell says any piece of it would be worth studying.
MCDOWELL: If you can learn about whether it's still good or why it went bad, that will help you when you're designing spaceships to go to Mars.
FADEL: The European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking network said Kosmos 482 most likely survived and reached Earth almost intact. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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