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Cake day: June 10th, 2023
















  • The reason the Soviet Venus probe reentry hasn’t received much coverage is that it landed in the ocean and didn’t hit anything important.

    Spaceflight historian Jonathan McDowell posted about it, but that’s about the extent of the coverage I’ve seen: https://bsky.app/profile/planet4589.bsky.social

    My own plot of the final orbit, showing the Roskosmos estimate of the path between reentry and impact in purple. I guess that Kosmos-482 SA reentered somewhere along this track between India and the ocean south of Australia.

    TL;DR: “Spacecraft could crash anywhere* on Earth!” makes for a clickable headline, “Spacecraft crashes harmlessly into the ocean”, does not.

    *+/- 52° latitude