Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry

https://www.leonarddavid.com/old-soviet-venus-descent-craft-nearing-earth-reentry/

by Wingman4l7 • 1 year ago

406 276 1 year ago

leonarddavid.com

quercusa• 1 year ago

Those of a certain age will remember this as the premise of the Six Million Dollar Man episode Death Probe (S4E13).

donnachangstein• 1 year ago

They would also remember there is a man with a cape in a phone booth that could be called upon to stop this thing.

greggsy• 1 year ago

No, the Six Million Dollar Man stopped it

CobrastanJorji• 1 year ago

That's a super idea, but sadly Underdog is fictional.

dreamcompiler2• 1 year ago

Raise your hand if you remember phone booths.

potato37328422• 1 year ago

It would be pretty stereotypically Soviet to create a parachute system that only mostly (some of the Venera probes kinda crashed) works in the intended use case (short 1-way trip to Venus) but also somehow manages to work once way, way, way outside of its intended operating environment (50yr orbiting earth).

0x000xca0xfe• 1 year ago

To be fair Venus' atmosphere is pretty much hell.

BitwiseFool• 1 year ago

Higher up the Venusian atmosphere is surprisingly earth-like. Interestingly though, once a probe gets deep enough into the atmosphere a parachute becomes unnecessary because the atmosphere has gotten so thick that a probe can simply soft-land.

varjag2• 1 year ago

Parachute deployment was possibly gasodynamic rather than electronically controlled. In which case there's a broad similarity on reentry in Earth atmosphere which could trigger the release.

orbital-decay• 1 year ago

Sounds unlikely, but it could have malfunctioned. I believe the deceleration chute was designed to deploy after the hot entry phase and be triggered mechanically once crossing the certain deceleration threshold of about 2g (I could be wrong though, take it with a huge grain of salt). It also worked as a pilot chute for the cap protecting the main one.

mrtksn2• 1 year ago

In my experience, in soviet engineering they don't augment stuff unless absolutely necessary. As a result, stuff tend to work as long as the physics work. It results in relatively crude but simple and reliable machines. The elegance comes from simplicity, in western tech the elegance comes from being well thought and designed for specific use cases. I.e. a Lada will be uncomfortable, loud, uneconomical car but at the same time it will withstand abuse and be easy to repair enough to get it going.

Thinking about the elevator in our commie block, it would have given a heart attack to a western European. Instead of having double doors to keep us safe from the moving wall, it had pads on the bottom and top edge so if your hand or leg is stuck, the pad will be pushed and the elevator will stop immediately. Also there was a tiny cabinet door on the right side so you can access the mechanism to force open the door or force move/halt the elevator. As kids, we would be experimenting with those mechanisms. They worked every single time, no legs or arms were lost.

throwewey2• 1 year ago

A Lada is actually an Italian car built under license.

Neah, paternoster is quite a common elevator design in the west: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift

JohnMakin• 1 year ago

I had the pleasure of working closely with a Russian engineer on a team once and had to “massage” his stuff quite often into a state that would be deemed acceptable to leadership. It looked terrible, hacked together, haphazard - but it literally never broke. It’s been the better part of a decade now but I wouldnt be surprised if his stuff outlived mine.

wileydragonfly2• 1 year ago

My elevator has double doors, but some of them were installed with too large of a gap between doors that a child can get trapped. The solution is to bolt plastic bumpers to the back of the outer door. Which, hey. Works.

em-bee2• 1 year ago

when i first heard about this probe last week i was wondering, isn't this thing old and unique enough to warrant a mission to rescue and preserve it? combined with todays lower prices for a space flight, it might just be worth it.

and now it looks like it might just survive anyways. but then according to the article there also seems to be a second (identical?) model. so maybe it's not that important, except for maybe material analysis what does 50 years of exposure to space do to the material.

rdtsc3• 1 year ago

In principle this is not science fiction, Space Shuttle captured a satellite, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-49, they just didn't return it back. It was a catch, fix, and release.

dreamcompiler2• 1 year ago

They did that when they fixed the Hubble telescope too. Five times.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope#Servi...

euroderf• 1 year ago

How many satellites have the USAF and US Space Command captured ? Inquring minds want to know.

walrus01• 1 year ago

The space shuttle also captured and returned the long duration exposure facility satellite, a materials test bus for future missions. Extremely uneconomical, however.

mk_stjames• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-51-A brought two satellites back in the cargo bay that had not reached their proper orbit on a prior launch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STS-32 brought back the Long Duration Exposure Facility experiment, a bigass science probe the size of a small school bus.

There are still missions that are classified that could have done so as well.

It was something the shuttle was designed to do, with the 60-foot cargo bay requirement and the ability to bring back the mass it flew with coming specifically from the military.

DonHopkins• 1 year ago

Is Catch Fix Release like Trap Neuter Return? Did they snip its ear tip for identification?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap%E2%80%93neuter%E2%80%93re...

MetallicDragon• 1 year ago

I don't think we have any active craft capable of recovering it. The space shuttle probably could have done it, but with a cost of about $1.5b per launch, there is no way that would be worth it.

SpaceX's Dragon 2 easily has enough cargo capacity to bring it down (~3 tons vs 0.5 ton), but there's still the question of intercepting, capturing, and securing it in Dragon's cargo bay. That would still cost something north of $100m to recover the lander.

dmurray• 1 year ago

Most of the benefit of the Shuttle program, and manned spaceflight in general, has come from R and D on the launch process, or from the prestige and bragging rights of being able to launch humans into space. So once they're up there, you're getting your money's worth (or not) no matter what they do, you may as well do something cool like recover a historic satellite.

olex• 1 year ago

Dragon likely wouldn't be able to get it, unfortunately.

The lander would easily fit into the unpressurized cargo bay (the "trunk"), that is typically used to launch various vacuum-bound payloads alongside pressurized cargo inside the capsule. However, for a return from orbit, the trunk cannot be used - it is not protected by a heat shield, and is ejected before re-entry.

You are correct that the return payload mass of a Dragon would technically allow it. But you'd need to somehow get the captured object _inside_ the capsule, which may be possible via the EVA front hatch for something smaller, but not 1m in diameter like the Venera lander.

Starship should be able to do it, since it is fully protected by heat shielding and returns in one piece, not ejecting any modules in orbit. But that's quite a while from being operational yet.

nradov2• 1 year ago

No, the Space Shuttle could not have done it. It had nowhere near the ΔV that would have been necessary for an intercept and capture. The OMS had only a tiny fuel supply. We're talking about orders of magnitude difference here.

bunderbunder4• 1 year ago

I would guess that the most expensive part of such an endeavor wouldn't be the launch; it would be developing and building a spacecraft capable of capturing it and bringing it back.

Even the Space Shuttle wasn't necessarily a perfect fit for the job as-is. Hubble was serviced many times, but it was specifically designed for on-orbit capture and servicing by the Shuttle. Before they decommissioned the shuttle they actually had to install an extra piece of hardware to make it feasible to capture and de-orbit using future non-crewed spacecraft. And even then that's just to make sure it crashes in a safe place, not to bring it home intact.

There was also a mission to service a satellite that wasn't designed for the purpose, and they had a really hard time capturing it and very nearly had to give up after days' worth of failed attempts. It finally took simultaneous EVA by three astronauts to coordinate a successful capture (one to grab it by hand, two to get it onto a specialized adapter rig built just for that satellite so that the Canadarm could hold it), which is quite a thing considering that the Shuttle's only designed to allow two people on EVA at a time.

This craft is likely tumbling, which I presume would make it unacceptably dangerous for a crewed mission (and certainly rules out anyone just going out there and grabbing it with their hands), in addition to making successful capture that much more difficult.

RobotToaster• 1 year ago

Wouldn't it be possible to "simply" match it's tumble?

chiffre01• 1 year ago

Is this one of the missions where the shuttle returned a satellite from orbit? There were a few:

https://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/dev/hillger/Shuttle-related...

AStonesThrow2• 1 year ago

Perhaps scientists would have some particular interest in that particular hardware as it had been launched and flown in Earth orbit, but I'll tell ya: it's way easier to get your hands on flight spare equipment; while this stuff hasn't flown, it's probably a really good copy of whatever they did launch into space, and way better condition.

When I worked "on Mars" there was a "flight spare" copy of a Viking instrument which was the predecessor to the one we were working on, and of course it was encased in Plexiglas as a museum piece, but it was truly a redundant copy, as NASA was into copying everything they sent into space, (what was the saying in Contact? "Why have only one, when you can buy two at twice the price?") so that if anything needed to be tweaked, or went wrong, they would have this copy on the ground that they could experiment with to their hearts' content.

Sharlin• 1 year ago

You're quite overestimating our capabilities as a species if you think that planning, developing, and launching a recovery mission in a few weeks would be even remotely feasible. Sure, we've known that the thing's up there all this time, so in the very counterfactual scenario where we had started thinking about a retrieval mission a few of years ago, and the Space Shuttle was still a thing, and someone was willing to foot the n-hundred-million-dollar bill, I guess? I don't think any nation on Earth currently has the hardware required to rendezvous with a random spacecraft in orbit and bring it down in one piece. The Shuttle was unique in that respect.

potato37328422• 1 year ago

Feasible for a 50yo project motivated by nostalgia? No

National existential crisis? They'd probably take Dragon and figure out how to make it work.

Rover2222• 1 year ago

This thing would be going at higher than earth orbital velocity, making an in-space capture of it more or less impossible.

klysm• 1 year ago

Who’s gonna pay for that?

ahmedfromtunis• 1 year ago

Man, I wish we had the technology to just concoct a spacecraft that can intercept the lander in its shallow reentry and bring it back in as few pieces as possible.

I don't know what value can it have to be studied since it never left low earth orbit (albeit it was there since 1972), but I know it would be a cool addition to any museum that may host it.

fsckboy• 1 year ago

space shuttle, the air force still has one, doesn't it? also, elon could whip something up.

pacificmint• 1 year ago

The Air Force never had a space shuttle, though NASA flew missions for the Air Force and the NRO.

But at this point none of the remaining shuttles are in an operational state.

Maybe you are thinking of the X-37 which is operated by the space force?

porphyra• 1 year ago

It's funny/sad how a bunch of Soviet Venera probes had malfunctioning camera lens caps and returned black photos. From Venera 9-12 all four probes had malfunctioning lens caps. And then

The Venera 14 craft had the misfortune of ejecting the camera lens cap directly under the surface compressibility tester arm, and returned information for the compressibility of the lens cap rather than the surface.

FredPret2• 1 year ago

It's funny now - imagine being the Commissar for Lens Cap design in the old USSR and overseeing all that

staplung• 1 year ago

Oh that Commissar was fine. It was the Commissar for Lens Cap Ejection Systems on Interplanetary Probes that got thrown under the avtobus.

dluan• 1 year ago

It's not limited to Soviet missions. My high school physics teacher worked at JPL on the Mars Climate Orbiter in the 90s. His entire NASA career was in development of it, and after 10 months of travel following successful launch, the thing exploded in the atmosphere without ever reaching the surface because the team at JPL used metric while Lockheed Martin used imperial. He was so spiritually broken by the experience that he quit and became a high school physics teacher. Great teacher, but to have your life's work go up in smoke like that is brutal.

drob5183• 1 year ago

Sergei is, sadly, ahem, no longer with us.

smallnix• 1 year ago

Jest aside, do we know how such failure was handled in the USSR?

marcodiego• 1 year ago

If it falls in my backyard. Can I keep it to myself?

eagerpace• 1 year ago

IncreasePosts2• 1 year ago

From a previous probe:

Space law required that the space junk be returned to its national owner, but the Soviets denied knowledge or ownership of the satellite.[8] Ownership therefore fell to the farmer upon whose property the satellite fell. The pieces were thoroughly analyzed by New Zealand scientists which determined that they were Soviet in origin because of manufacturing marks and the high-tech welding of the titanium. The scientists concluded that they were probably gas pressure vessels of a kind used in the launching rocket for a satellite or space vehicle and had decayed in the atmosphere.[9]

I wonder how space law works when the national owner (CCCP) no longer exists? Does it go to Russia? Kazakhstan?

CryptoBanker• 1 year ago

Russia is the successor state to the USSR

treyd• 1 year ago

Usually international law regarding successor states applies, so it would almost certainly be Russia that would have a claim to it.

mensetmanusman• 1 year ago

What are the chances it lands and kills a whale?

mystified5016• 1 year ago

Whales are not typically found on land, and usually when they're already dead.

IncreasePosts2• 1 year ago

You've clearly never been to a Walmart outside Indianapolis before.

ChocolateGod• 1 year ago

What if it lands on water though?

simonebrunozzi• 1 year ago

I think we can still estimate that probability. I'd say 0%.

TiredOfLife3• 1 year ago

Yeah, that bureaucrat is at least 20% responsible for the current US administration

alexfromapex2• 1 year ago

It sounds like it will definitely land, no parachute, because it was made to be strong enough to survive the pressures of Venus. I hope it doesn't land near me.

1970-01-01• 1 year ago

Sorry, but there is still no chance it will land. It's safe to bet your house on it making a nice crater or just disappearing from radar into the drink.

stevage4• 1 year ago

Sounds like you have different definitions of landing.

alexfromapex2• 1 year ago

Sorry, I had assumed that a crash landing was obvious from what I said. I don’t know how it could be unclear since there’s no parachute.

ahazred8ta2• 1 year ago

Lithobraking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lithobraking is very reliable but a bit hard on the equipment.

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

Would be awesome if it soft-landed on a field and started taking and transmitting pictures of sheep.

LordGrignard• 1 year ago

or even better yet, landed on a desert and taking pictures of cactii and camels

rbanffy3• 1 year ago

I think sheep would e funnier, but camels would be OK as well.

eh_why_not• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_482

Its landing module, which weighs 495 kilograms (1,091 lb), is highly likely to reach the surface of Earth in one piece as it was designed to withstand 300 G's of acceleration and 100 atmospheres of pressure.

Awesome! I don't know how you can design for 300 G's of acceleration!

dgrin91• 1 year ago

Nitpicking, but wouldn't it be 300 Gs of deceleration? I know the math is basically the same, but technically the words a mean different things

jbnorth• 1 year ago

What is deceleration but acceleration in the opposite direction? /s

crazydoggers2• 1 year ago

Acceleration is a vector. So if you apply the “deceleration” long enough you’ll eventually be accelerating in the opposite direction. Without a frame of reference it’s all the same. Even with a frame of reference you’re still accelerating just that it’s in he opposite direction of the current velocity.

amoshebb• 1 year ago

I think this is a case where “technically” the words mean the same thing but “generally” they mean different things.

anyfoo3• 1 year ago

Acceleration, deceleration, point is: Something is going to apply 300 gs in a certain direction to design for.

It's not like you can tell whether you're going slow or fast, in one direction, the other direction, or even just standing still, if you close your eyes.

exabrial• 1 year ago

Flip your phone upside brah

Rover2222• 1 year ago

This is wrong when talking about the physics of something. Deceleration is acceleration. Acceleration is just a change in velocity.

drob5183• 1 year ago

It’s just a minus sign.

os2warpman• 1 year ago

There are electronics and gyroscopes designed for >9,000 G loads, in guided artillery shells.

Aerospace is awesome.

nandomrumber2• 1 year ago

88.2 m/s^2

For well under a second though, typically artillery muzzle velocity is, what, two to three thousand feet a second?

Still, it’s wild that guidance electronics and control mechanisms can survive that sort of acceleration.

WJW2• 1 year ago

Overbuild everything. For things that might be fragile-ish like surface mounted electronics, cast the whole thing in resin. As a sibling poster has mentioned, we shoot things out of artillery tubes these days that have way harsher accelerations than 300g.

MarkMarine• 1 year ago

300g is nuts. Electronics in a shell is one thing, this is a landing craft. In a prior life my designs had to survive 12g aerial drop loads and we had to make things pretty robust.

numpad0• 1 year ago

Gun scopes are minimum 500G rated. Apparently that's the ballpark for recoils(the reaction force from the barrel becoming a rocket engine, and/or the bolt/carrier bottoming out)

casylum• 1 year ago

If anyone wants to try and see it the orbit is listed.

https://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=6073

lenerdenator3• 1 year ago

[flagged]

copula4• 1 year ago

His name is not Vlad, it's a familiar form of a completely unrelated name. If you want to demonstrate contempt by using a familiar form, use Vova.

It sounds about the same as if I used something like "Joe" to refer to a William.

margalabargala2• 1 year ago

[flagged]

lenerdenator3• 1 year ago

[flagged]

TiredOfLife3• 1 year ago

The Vlad part is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler

tomhow• 1 year ago

We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43874642 and marked it off topic.

ConanRus• 1 year ago

Soviet is the best (c)

CommenterPerson• 1 year ago

If the parachute had already deployed sometime during the past 50 years, wouldn't it burn up on re-entry?

cactusfrog• 1 year ago

This would be a good start of a plot line for some alien life form

y33t• 1 year ago

It's already the start for Night of the Living Dead.

drob5183• 1 year ago

Lander reports that Venus is very… earth-like.

erulabs• 1 year ago

Any projected intercept for earth yet? Feels like it might be quite beautiful on reentry assuming you’re in the right (but not TOO right) spot.

jasonkester• 1 year ago

Childhood me hopes this will play out exactly like the Six Million Dollar Man episode. That it will roam around terrorizing rural California, and we’ll have to team up with a pretty young Russian scientist and Bigfoot to stop it.

I wonder if the producers of that show knew about that failed mission, and that this was actually really in earth orbit, when they wrote that episode.

Jun8• 1 year ago

“Oscar: Irina, you know that Steve is bionic. If he's careful ...

Irina: You don't understand. I designed that probe for Venus. Venus Oscar. A planet with temperatures of 900 degrees, 300 mile per hour winds, pressures up to 90 earth atmospheres. Even a bionic man couldn't survive under those conditions.”

hackeraccount• 1 year ago

Came here looking for this reference; left not dissapointed.

Aachen• 1 year ago

Article says ±3.1 days, but the author wrote a newer entry (go to homepage, click on latest article, click through to space.com link¹) that says May 10, ±2.2 days.

Starting to get to the range where a timezone would be helpful!

Via Wikipedia², which will probably also get updated fast, this page says they'll stay updated with the latest estimate: https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosmos-842-descent-...

¹ https://www.space.com/space-exploration/launches-spacecraft/...

² https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_482

rich_sasha• 1 year ago

The blog post seems to say the reentry time depends somewhat on (future, unknown) solar activity, contributing to the estimation error.

Why would this be? Is the solar wind strong enough to affect the velocity of a dense object such as this?

dotancohen• 1 year ago

The solar wind affects the atmosphere, specifically by raising it, such that the probe may experience more atmospheric drag.

fguerraz• 1 year ago

Solar activity affects the outer layer of our atmosphere which expands with solar activity and affects the drag of satellites. This is how starlight lost a bunch of satellites last year.

af784• 1 year ago

May 9th is in that range. My goodness, how ironic it would be if it hit the parade in Moscow...

oleganza• 1 year ago

what's ironic about that?

hvenev• 1 year ago

Sadly the inclination of the orbit prevents it from falling that far north.

kamranjon• 1 year ago

I wonder if something like this could basically be a time capsule for germs/viruses/pathogens that no longer exist? Could that ever be a risk?

bobxmax• 1 year ago

Highly unlikely given sterilization before launch and Venus basically being a deep fryer

But also technically not impossible. For example if the dormant microbes react to prolonged microgravity and radiation in ways we don't understand, perhaps it brings back something we haven't seen before

Could be a fun science fiction plot

cogman102• 1 year ago

If I'm reading the article correctly, it never made it to Venus.

cogman102• 1 year ago

Not likely.

This thing spent 50 years in high earth orbit. Everything will have received a huge dosage of radiation along with periodic freezing and boiling temperatures.

Something may have survived, life is crazy like that, but it's unlikely it will be a dangerous pathogen to humans. In fact, surviving life will have likely adapted to eat any of the pathogens.

Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry

Related Stories