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CNN
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A piece of a Soviet vehicle that malfunctioned en route to Venus more than 50 years ago is due to crash back to Earth as soon as this week.

Much about the piece of space debris, called Cosmos 482 (also spelled Kosmos 482), is unknown.

Though most projections estimate that the object will reenter the atmosphere around May 10, unknowns about its exact shape and size — as well as the unpredictability of space weather — make some degree of uncertainty inevitable.

It’s also unclear which portion of the vehicle is set to reenter, though researchers believe it to be the probe, or “entry capsule,” which was designed to survive the extreme temperature and pressure of landing on Venus — which has an atmosphere 90 times more dense than Earth’s. That means it could survive its unexpected trip back home, posing a small but non-zero risk to people on the ground.

While space junk and meteors routinely veer toward a crash-landing on Earth, most of the objects disintegrate as they’re torn apart due to friction and pressure as they hit Earth’s thick atmosphere while traveling thousands of miles per hour.

But if the Cosmos 482 object is indeed a Soviet reentry capsule, it would be equipped with a substantial heat shield, meaning it “might well survive Earth atmosphere entry and hit the ground,” according to Dr. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist and astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who shared his predictions about Cosmos 482 on his website.

The risk of the object hitting people on the ground is likely minimal, and there’s “no need for major concern,” McDowell wrote, “but you wouldn’t want it bashing you on the head.”

The Soviet Space Research Institute, or IKI, was formed in the mid-1960s amid the 20th-century space race, which pitted the Soviet Union against its chief space-exploring competitor, the United States.

The IKI’s Venera program sent a series of probes toward Venus in the 1970s and ‘80s, with several surviving the trip and beaming data and images back to Earth before ceasing operations.

Two spacecraft under that program, V-71 No. 670 and V-71 No. 671, launched in 1972, according to McDowell. But only one made a successful voyage to Venus: V-71 No. 670 operated for about 50 minutes on the planet’s surface.

V-71 No. 671 did not. A rocket carried the Venera spacecraft into a “parking orbit” around Earth. However, the vehicle then failed to put itself on a Venus transfer trajectory, leaving it stranded closer to home, according to NASA.

Beginning in the 1960s, Soviet vehicles left in Earth’s orbit were each given the Cosmos name and a numerical designation for tracking purposes, according to NASA.

Several pieces of debris were created from V-71 No. 671’s failure. At least two have already fallen out of orbit. But researchers believe the one set to plummet back to our planet this week is the cylindrical entry capsule — or Cosmos 482 — because of the way the vehicle has behaved in orbit.

“It is quite dense, whatever it is, because it had a very low point in its orbit, yet it didn’t decay for decades,” said Marlon Sorge, a space debris expert with the federally funded research group, The Aerospace Corporation. “So it’s clearly bowling ball-ish.”

And though the Venus probe was equipped with a parachute, the vehicle has been out of service in the harsh environment of space for the past few decades. That means it’s highly unlikely that a parachute could deploy at the right time or serve to slow down the vehicle’s descent, Sorge and Langbroek told CNN.

The chances of Cosmos 482 causing deadly damage is are roughly 1 in 25,000, according to The Aerospace Corporation’s calculations, Sorge said.

That’s a much lower risk than some other pieces of space debris. At least a few defunct rocket parts reenter Earth’s atmosphere each year, Sorge noted, and many have carried higher odds of catastrophe.

But if the Cosmos 482 object does hit the ground, it is likely to land between 52 degrees North and 52 South latitudes, Langbroek said via email.

“That area encompasses several prominent landmasses and countries: the whole of Africa, South America, Australia, the USA, parts of Canada, parts of Europe, and parts of Asia,” Langbroek said.

“But as 70% of our planet is water, chances are good that it will end up in an Ocean somewhere,” Langbroek said via email. “Yes, there is a risk, but it is small. You have a larger risk of being hit by lightning once in your lifetime.”

Sorge emphasized that if Cosmos 482 hits dry land, it’s crucial that bystanders do not attempt to touch the debris. The old spacecraft could leak dangerous fuels or pose other risks to people and property.

“Contact the authorities,” Sorge urged. “Please don’t mess with it.”

Parker Wishik, a spokesperson for the Aerospace Corporation, added that under the 1967 Outer Space Treaty — which remains the primary document outlining international space law — Russia would maintain ownership of any surviving debris and may seek to recover it after landing.

And while the global space community has taken steps in recent years to ensure that fewer spacecraft make uncontrolled crash-landings back on Earth, the Cosmos 482 vehicle highlights the importance of continuing those efforts, Wishik added.

“What goes up must come down,” he said. “We’re here talking about it more than 50 years later, which is another proof point for the importance of debris mitigation and making sure we’re having that that dialogue (as a space community) because what you put up in space today might affect us for decades to come.”

Editor’s Note: Watch Kaitlan Collins’ interview with former Vice President Mike Pence on CNN’s “The Source” at 9 pm ET.

CNN
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Former Vice President Mike Pence criticized President Donald Trump’s across-the-board tariffs on Monday, arguing that a looming “price shock” to the economy and potential shortages will lead Americans to “demand a different approach” from the White House.

In an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Pence rebuffed Trump’s recent comments that children in the United States will have to make do with fewer toys.

Trump’s first-term vice president also said he sees some of Trump’s actions as sharp breaks from what he said were the successes of their administration. That includes “wavering support for Ukraine” in its war with Russia and the “marginalizing the right to life” that Pence said followed Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s selection as health and human services secretary.

CNN
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On a typical day, British photographer Rosie Lugg and her mother, Hayley Champion, spend almost every moment together.

“My mum is pretty much my best friend,” Lugg tells CNN Travel. “We’ll have breakfast together. We go to the gym together. We go for walks together. Just chat about pretty much anything and everything.”

So when 22-year-old Lugg started planning a three-month travel adventure to Southeast Asia — her first long-haul trip with her boyfriend — she immediately shared the travel ideas with Champion.

In turn, Lugg’s mother started sharing memories of her time in Thailand and Malaysia, where she worked for a period back in the mid-1990s. Champion had a bunch of photos from her time there, she told her daughter, buried in a box somewhere.

Lugg encouraged her to hunt out the shots: she was interested partly as a photographer, and partly because she loved the idea of getting a glimpse into her mother’s younger years and her parents’ love story. She knew her mother and father met in the 1990s, while teaching scuba diving in Malaysia, but not much else about their time there.

“So mum took me through all of her film photos that she has in the attic — boxes and boxes of film photos,” recalls Lugg.

The prints were taken on a Olympus mju, a small silver film camera that first went on sale in 1991 and which Champion carried in her bag through most of the ensuing decade.

This compact point-and-shoot has had a bit of a renaissance on eBay in recent years, thanks to its Instagram-ready aesthetic. But Lugg fell in love with her mothers’ Olympus mju pictures not only because of the way they captured the light and their grainy vibrancy.

More than anything, she just loved seeing her mother in her early 20s, smiling into the camera, eating dumplings, exploring markets and walking on sandy beaches. It was a wonderful insight into her mother’s life and travels three decades prior.

What also struck both women, that day in the attic, was their striking mother-daughter resemblance. Lugg and Champion two knew they looked alike, but in these pictures it was undeniable.

“I get told I look like her now, but it’s when I look at pictures of her when she was my age that it’s really obvious,” says Lugg.

In many of her mother’s 1990s Southeast Asia shots, “it was like looking at a picture of myself, which is so bizarre,” says Lugg.

As she thumbed through the prints, marveling at the physical similarities (“even the way we stand…”) an idea started brewing in Lugg’s mind. She turned to her mother:

“It would be really cool if I could recreate these photos,” she said.

This idea was cemented when Champion discovered she still had that Olympus mju, even though she’d long retired it in favor of her iPhone and it was “full of sand, on its way out,” as Lugg puts it.

So Lugg stuffed the 30-year-old Olympus into her backpack and boarded her flight to Thailand.

Lugg arrived in Southeast Asia armed with the vintage camera, pictures of her mother’s photos saved on a phone and no plan beyond seeing where the project — and her travels — would take her. She began her trip in Indonesia, intending to explore Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.

Lugg didn’t have the exact locations of Champion’s 1990s photos (“she can’t remember a lot of them because we didn’t have Google Maps pins at the time,” Lugg explains). So instead of attempting to find the exact spots where the original photos were taken, Lugg decided just to look out for places that reminded her of the places in the mother’s photos.

She wanted to worry less about the specifics and more about capturing a similar moment in time.

Take, for example, one of the 1990s pictures where Champion is captured walking away from the camera on an empty, sandy beach.

Champion thinks this picture was taken on the Thai island of Ko Phi Phi Don. Three decades later, Lugg found herself sitting on Selong Beach in Lombok, Indonesia, looking out at the horizon. She noticed the coastline was a similar shape to that in her mother’s photo. While Ko Phi Phi Don is some 2,600 kilometers (1,615 miles) away from Lombok, Lugg felt there was an aesthetic similarity that was worth capturing. The sky was similarly blue. She also felt the relaxed happiness that the original photo seemed to capture.

Lugg quickly set up the shot in the “exact right position” then passed the Olympus camera to her boyfriend (“he’s very good at being a human tripod,” she laughs). Then she started walking away from the camera, just like her mother in the 1990s shot.

The nature of film photography meant Lugg couldn’t overthink the result — her reel of film only had 36 pictures. Her boyfriend couldn’t snap dozens of options. He had to press the shutter button and hope for the best.

“Every single picture, we only did one try,” says Lugg, who adds this limitation was also part of the simplicity of her recreated picture project: “I really wanted it to be just that memory captured as it is.”

The Olympus camera offered none of the instant gratification of a smartphone, Lugg had to wait until the film was developed to see the results. She knew there was a chance they might be “out of focus or blurry” but embracing this unknown was part of the fun.

“That’s the magic of film,” says Lugg. “The fact that you can’t look back at the pictures instantly, and you have to look forward to getting them developed to see how it came out.”

Later in her trip, while in the Philippines and Vietnam, Lugg got a few of her rolls of film developed and got her first glimpse at her recreations. She was delighted with the results, and immediately messaged some of the pictures home to her mother in the UK.

“It was really fun getting them whilst we were still traveling, and then obviously being able to send them home whilst we’re still there, like little postcards,” says Lugg.

Her mother loved seeing the pictures, says Lugg. The familial resemblance had never been more apparent. Paired together, it was often hard to tell if the photo was of Lugg or Champion, taken in 1994 or 2024.

“It was really fun to recreate them and see how similar we actually are,” says Lugg.

Recreating the photos also helped Lugg in the moments when she missed her mother — given how close they are, it was “a really strange feeling, going away for such an extended amount of time.”

“It was the longest time I would have been away from her, and we were both very aware of it,” Lugg adds. “But this was such a fun way to feel even more connected to her. Recreating memories that she’d had felt a lot like being close to her.”

Once she was back home in the UK, Lugg spent long evenings swapping stories with her mother, and comparing their respective photos.

“They’re not the exact same locations. They’re not the exact same experiences,” stresses Lugg. “But they’re really similar, and when you see them, physically in front of you, side by side, that’s a really cool feeling.”

She’s since shared the photographs on her social media, where she posts her photography projects @rambosphotos. Lugg is also considering framing the pictures, side-by-side.

At some point on Lugg’s trip, her mother’s Olympus mju camera finally broke. Lugg’s glad it lasted for so long, but she wasn’t quite ready to say goodbye to it just yet. Now she uses another new-old Olympus mju, purchased on eBay, and is excited for future travel adventures and future photo recreations.

In the meantime, Lugg, now 23, is enjoying being back in the UK, sharing pictures, stories and memories with her mother.

She feels closer to Champion than ever, even after spending a few months on the opposite side of the world.

“It tells you more about who they are,” she says of looking at her parents’ old photos and hearing their travel stories.

“I feel like every child will get this with their parents when it’s a huge realization that they had a life before you. And it’s such a strange feeling. The more stories they tell, the more I’m like, ‘Wow, you really did a lot before I was here.’”