An old (failed) Soviet lander originally destined for Venus is coming home:

The former Soviet Union’s Cosmos 482 was lofted back in 1972. But that country’s attempted Venus probe ran amuck during its rocket-assisted toss to the cloud-veiled world. Payload leftovers were marooned in Earth orbit, specifically the spacecraft’s lander module/capsule intended to parachute onto the hellish landscape of Venus.

“As this is a lander that was designed to survive passage through the Venus atmosphere, it is possible that it will survive reentry through the Earth atmosphere intact, and impact intact,” reported Marco Langbroek of SatTrackCam Leiden, the Netherlands. “There are many uncertain factors in this though, including that this will be a long shallow reentry trajectory and the age of the object,” observes Langbroek, who now pegs the current nominal forecast for its reentry on May 10, plus/minus 2.2 days.

This is like catnip to some of us space exploration nerds. The Soviet Union is the only space program which successfully sent a probe to Venus which survived long enough to take photographs of the surface. Venus is notoriously inhospitable: the surface temperature is 867 degrees Fahrenheit (hot enough to melt lead), and atmospheric pressure 92 times greater than Earth’s at sea level. Oh, and clouds of sulfuric acid! So yeah, most missions to Venus fail, and none have lasted longer than about two hours.

The entire Venera program is a fascinating Wikipedia deep-dive. We beat the Soviets to the moon, but they did the most consequential explorations of Venus by mankind to this day.

Just writing about this makes me read to do a rewatch of For All Mankind…

UPDATE: The probe might have a deployed parachute!