Kosmos 482 har cirkulerat okontrollerat kring jorden i 53 år

Tracking a space object that's hurtling around Earth every hour and a half is no easy task, but predicting where it will land days ahead of time is almost impossible, according to Bill Barrett, an orbital expert from Asia Pacific Aerospace Consultants.

"It's very hard just to predict when something like this is going to come back … [it's] one of the hardest things in orbital mechanics," he said.
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Aerospace Corporation, a federally funded space organisation in the US, has been using publicly available radar data supplied by the US Space Surveillance network to track the out-of-control probe.

At time of publishing, it predicted the Kosmos 482 will land at 12:37pm AEST on Saturday, May 10, with 16 hours leeway either side.

But other experts, such as Marco Langbroek at from Delft Technical University in the Netherlands, who has been tracking the object since 2019, suggests that the spacecraft might come down about five hours later, plus or minus 20 hours.

That means the spacecraft could crash back to Earth as early as 8pm AEST Friday.

The European Space Agency reports that the lander "was not spotted by radar over Germany at the expected" during an anticipated pass at 3:32 am ET. They concluded that "it is most likely that the reentry has already occurred."

The location and exact time of the landing are still uncertain. Other satellite tracking stations have not provided updates on potential landing sites as of Saturday morning.

In short:
Russia's space agency says the Kosmos 482 lander has made an uncontrolled re-entry to Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.

The half-tonne Soviet vehicle malfunctioned after its launch in 1972 and never made it out of Earth's orbit for the next 53 years.

What's next?
Any surviving wreckage will belong to Russia under a United Nations treaty.