Venera 8's Double Could Drag Parachute Behind It: Scientists Assume

The landing options for the Soviet "Venus" spacecraft "Cosmos-482", which should occur around May 10, 2025, are being worked out by specialists from the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics. Having studied the photographs of the descent balloon provided by foreign observers, they suggested that the parachute of the descent vehicle could have opened in space.

Let us recall that Kosmos-482 was a failed backup of the Venera-8 spacecraft, which was sent four days later, on March 31, 1972. While Venera-8 successfully reached the surface of Venus and accomplished all its tasks, its double, which could have become Venera-9, remained in near-earth orbit – its booster engine needed only 40 seconds of operation to escape the clutches of Earth’s gravity. Since it was not customary to report unsuccessful launches at that time, the spacecraft was renamed Kosmos-482, and it continued to rotate in near-earth orbit, gradually descending. According to ballistic calculations, this spacecraft should pass through the dense layers of the Earth’s atmosphere and fall to Earth presumably on May 10. The impact site is predicted to be between 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south latitude.

This range includes Bryansk, Saratov, Irkutsk, Kursk, Voronezh regions, Khabarovsk Krai, Altai Krai, the Republic of Khakassia and the Republic of Buryatia. Foreign countries include Egypt, Türkiye, Greece and others.

MK Reference. The Kosmos-482 spacecraft was created by the Lavochkin Machine-Building Plant (now the Lavochkin Scientific and Production Association) to deliver a descent module with a cosmic ray detector, a soil radiation meter, an air composition sensor, an illumination, temperature and pressure meter to the surface of Venus. The total weight of the apparatus is 1,184 kilograms, the weight of the descent module is about 500 kg, the diameter is about 1 meter, the material is titanium with inserts of other metals. The speed of the descent module's fall is about 100 meters per second.

Experts talk about the potential danger of approaching a fallen "messenger" from the Soviet past. In particular, according to Viktor Voropaev, lead engineer at the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, the design of the descent vehicle may retain pyropatrons for firing off the soft landing device - the parachute. There is an interesting feature that Voropaev shared with MK:

– In the images taken in 2024 by Danish astrophotographer Ralf Vandeberg, a certain “tail” is visible next to the bright spherical object.

It has been suggested that the parachute system of the Kosmos-482 descent module, designed to operate in the atmosphere of Venus when the pressure reaches 0.6 atmospheres, was somehow activated in space, and the braking parachute came out. In this case, it cannot be ruled out that part of the opened parachute (given that the fabric for it was created for the hot Venusian atmosphere) may survive even when passing through the dense layers of the Earth's atmosphere.

However, there is a more rational assumption (expressed by the astronautics enthusiast Vladimir Pavlyuk) that when the station and the descent module separated, which occurred at the end of April 1972, mats of the so-called screen-vacuum thermal insulation, which protected the Venusian station at the stage of interplanetary flight, remained attached to the "ball". Unfortunately, the documents stored in the RGANTD (Russian State Archive of Scientific and Technical Documentation - Ed. ) related to the design of type 3B stations have not yet been declassified as "for official use only", which does not allow us to make a reliable conclusion about the origin of the "tail" photographed by the foreign photographer.