Early on Saturday morning, a Soviet spacecraft that had been launched on a botched mission to Venus in 1972 is thought to have fallen back onto Earth.

The ship was last seen by radar above Germany, according to the European Space Agency, which was keeping an eye on its uncontrollably falling trajectory. The Kosmos 482 was no longer detectable by radars at the time of its anticipated impact, leading them to conclude that “it is most likely that the reentry has already occurred.”

No damage or injuries have been recorded

The Kosmos 482 spacecraft was a component of the Venera program, a set of probes designed to study the planet Venus for the USSR. Kosmos 482’s rocket failed, but ten of those missions made a successful landing on the scorching, desolate planet. The lower stage, which held the descent ship, became trapped in Earth’s orbit.

The roughly three-foot-wide, 1,069-pound spaceship circled the Earth in an ever smaller elliptical orbit over the next fifty-three years, until it approached the planet closely enough to plunge into its atmosphere.

Space debris falling back to Earth is not uncommon. According to ESA, more than 2,400 man-made items fell from orbit in 2022, setting a new record. Most of them splashed into an ocean, and the great majority burned up in Earth’s atmosphere.

However, Kosmos 482 was designed to function on Venus’s surface, where the average temperature is 867 degrees Fahrenheit (464 C), and to survive a descent through the planet’s thick atmosphere. This implied that it was sufficiently resilient in theory to withstand a relatively simple re-entry through the atmosphere of Earth.

No human death has ever been linked to space debris. When discussing Kosmos-482, ESA officials said in a blog post that “the risk of any satellite reentry causing injury is extremely remote.” “There is a less than one in 100 billion chance that a single human will be hurt by space junk each year. In contrast, the odds of someone being struck by lightning are almost 65,000 times higher.

The U.S. Space Force predicted Friday that the spacecraft would return to the atmosphere on Saturday morning around 1:52 a.m. ET over the Pacific Ocean, west of Guam.