A Soviet-era space probe crashed back to Earth after more than 50 years in orbit

A Soviet spacecraft that’s been stuck in low Earth orbit ever since it launched in 1972 has finally crashed back down to our planet.

Kosmos 482 rocketed into space more than 50 years ago on a quest to reach Venus, but its journey was scuttled by an apparent engine malfunction. Over time the craft fell closer and closer to Earth as its orbit decayed, and this weekend it finally came hurtling back to the planet’s surface, according to multiple government space agencies.

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.

And according to the European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office, Kosmos 482 was last spotted over Germany before disappearing from radar, leading the office to conclude that reentry probably occurred around 2:16 a.m. ET.

Because Kosmos 482 was designed to withstand the harsh atmosphere of Venus, some astronomers predicted it would remain intact and not burn up when it returned to Earth.

NASA said it was “possible” that Kosmos 482 survived reentry. The European Union Space Surveillance and Tracking network said it “most likely survived and reached the ground almost intact.”

But since it likely fell over the ocean, any surviving remnants of Kosmos 482 may be hard to find, an inconvenient fact for scientists hoping to study it.

“If you can learn about whether it’s still good or why it went bad, that will help you when you’re designing spaceships to go to Mars,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics at Harvard & Smithsonian, told NPR’s Morning Edition.