Also similar to the strange subplot in "Until the End of the World" [1] where a damaged Indian nuclear satellite threatens to fall to earth destroying civilization.

[1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101458/

Kenner also released a surprisingly large toy version of that probe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTWJc72p2pE

Was that the episode where it was defeated by screwing an eye hook into the top of it and lifting it to immobilize?

Ah I've been trying to dig up that episode from my faulty memory for years! I was convinced it was an episode of the A-Team fighting a killer tank instead.

Its a dalek: Just climb stairs.

USSR focused on Venus, because at that time it wasn't apparent which one would be more interesting/accessible -- Venus or Mars.

And USSR didn't want to compete with US anymore, after lost the Moon race. USSR really did want the Moon too, after so many prior successes. So switching to Venus allowed to "split" the race.

Any information on ocean depth in that area? Or did it float? for a while?

From NASA article - https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id... Apparently, it broke up too 4 pieces soon after launch time and it was the lander that was circling earth for 53 years..

From https://www.npr.org/2025/05/12/nx-s1-5395631/a-soviet-era-sp...

"...The Russian space agency Roscosmos said in a Telegram post that the spacecraft reentered Earth's atmosphere Saturday morning at 2:24 a.m. ET and landed in the Indian Ocean somewhere west of Jakarta, Indonesia. It said Kosmos 482 reentered the atmosphere about 350 miles west of Middle Andaman Island off the coast of Myanmar. ..."

NASA gave the same reentry time and landing location for the spacecraft in a post on its website...."

Too expensive. It's very hard to find even an aircraft carrier at the surface, ocean is just too big. Metallic non-moving things at the bottom is easier, but it still often takes years to find a large sank ship, yet alone a small round spacecraft.

But there are many ocean hunters ready to jump on the assignment, if you secure funding.

Coming down at "145 miles per hour-plus" and a "mass of just under 500 kg and 1-meter size" I would imagine there are just pieces out there now.

There's nothing to indicate there were radioisotope sources on this mission.

Public information: [0] describes the six publicly-disclosed Soviet radioisotope launches up to 1989. (It's not a primary source; it's hard to find those). This one's not among them—none of the Venus missions were reported to use radioisotopes. This Kosmos 482[1] and the rest of the Soviet Venera program were publicly described as being solar-powered, which is evidence against any engineering need for other power sources. The landing probes themselves carried chemical batteries (they were very short-lived landers).

Nothing I can find through search contradicts [0]. Wikipedia's list[2] is the same, and adds two more post-1989 launches.

Seven radioisotope payloads have already reentered/crashed into Earth before—four Soviet or Russian and three American; some thermometric generators and some simple heaters; containing either polonium-210 or plutonium-238. That's not counting fission reactors, of which there are several in addition (I'm unclear the precise count of which nuclear reactors returned to Earth, or simply exploded in orbit; or what became of the latter group).

[0] https://nuke.fas.org/space/sovspace.pdf (Gary L. Bennett, "A look at the Soviet space nuclear power program" (1989))

[1] https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id... ("Two solar array wings, with an area of 2.5 meters, had a span of 4 meters. Due to the spacecraft's proximity to the Sun at Venus, the wings were only partially covered with solar cells".)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_power_systems_... ("List of nuclear power systems in space")

They always can. But I think it’s sometimes kind of interesting to see the creativity of trying to reconcile such an outlandish belief with the evidence.

<sarcasm>Obviously it hit bounced off the sky dome and came back down.</sarcasm>

Nobody saw them falling, so no reason to explain fake news

Oh, they will think up something, and gullable useful idiots will continue to believe they actually believe that stuff, whilst they rake in the money from content engagement, laughing at the idiots trying to convince them the earth isnt flat for the 9000th time

There’s a (very slim) chance this one is being preserved at the bottom of the Indian Ocean for whoever invents submersible scanner drone swarm tech to find it.

Doing this requires immense amounts of energy because you need to match its velocity to safely bump it.

I was under the impression that the Soviets launched multiple identical missions to account for failure. In other words: rather than investing a huge effort into reducing the probability of failure of a singular mission, they invested in multiple missions in hopes that one would be successful. If that is the case, it sounds like the had much more confidence in the engineers who did the design work than their ability to do quality control while building.

Any how, it's meaningless to compare old Soviet products to new Western ones. The older Soviet ones are likely still in use due to an incentive to maintain and repair them. Old Western products were probably just as repairable, but there was less incentive to do so. As for new Western products, there are both technological and business reasons to ignore repairability.

> It is not surprising that it remained intact for 53 years.

I mean we couldn't use for the last 53 years and it didn't fulfill its mission. It's like saying the boulder in my yard has remained intact for 100 years "they just don't build them like they used".

We are talking about space junk, a dead chunk of metal just orbiting Earth until its inevitable decay. Saying that it was "intact" and "built to last" is disingenuous.

Weren't USSR products rather famously poorly built?