A chunk from a 53-year-old Soviet spacecraft designed to land on Venus is set to cannonball back to Earth next weekend, and nobody knows where it might land. The Kosmos 482 probe, made and launched by the U.S.S.R. in 1972, was built as part of the Venera program that collected data from Venus's hellish surface. But a malfunction in the upper stage of the Soyuz rocket booster that lofted the ship skyward scuppered its mission, leaving the craft without the required velocity to reach the planet and instead marooning it in an elliptical orbit around our own.
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