Kosmos 482 and the Zombie Apocalypse

 

A May 16, 2002 article by satellite tracker and lecturer at Delft Technical University (Netherlands) Marco Langbroek explores the ultimate fate of Kosmos 482, a failed 1972 Russian space probe originally intended to land on Venus that instead got caught in earth orbit. Langbroek’s calculations suggest it will re-enter earth’s atmosphere “around 2025-2026.” Interestingly, since the probe was designed to survive what we now know to be the hellish conditions of the Cytherean atmosphere (with its clouds of sulfuric acid, temperature hot enough to melt lead, and pressures nearly equivalent to oceanic depths of a kilometer here on earth), it will probably survive the fiery descent, coming down somewhere between 52 degrees of latitude north or south of the equator.

Kosmos 482 is just one of a number of failed Venusian probes launched by the Soviet space agency (and NASA) in the early decades of interplanetary exploration. The first attempt to touch our nearest planetary neighbor was launched by the Soviets on February 4, 1961, a modified Mars exploration spacecraft intended to enter Venus’ atmosphere (an obvious sign that at the time our understanding of the conditions of the Venusian atmosphere were woefully inadequate!). Due to the failure of a transformer on the booster rocket that had “not been designed to work in a vacuum” (doh!) the spacecraft “re-entered” earth atmosphere three weeks later (Siddiqi 29).

Fellow Soviet vehicle Venera 1 (launched February 12, 1961) successfully left earth orbit, only to lose contact with earth before its course-correction motors could be fired; it is estimated to have passed no closer that 100,000 km of Venus. The problem was later determined to be a “faulty optical sensor that malfunctioned because of excess heat after the spacecraft’s thermal control system failed” (Siddiqi 31).


Mock-up of Venera 1, Memorial Museum of Aeronautics. Courtesy of Armael.

The first US attempt to fly by Venus also failed; on July 22, 1962 Mariner 1 failed to achieve the correct trajectory during launch and had to be destroyed only 29 seconds later. Mariner 2, launched on August 27, 1962, became the first successful interplanetary probe launched by humanity. On J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthday, January 3, 1963, the probe passed within 35,000 km of the Evening Star, sending back the startling information that our seemingly beautiful sister world guarded several nasty secrets, including a dense layer of clouds and a surface temperature of at least 800 F – so much for science fiction writers who believed Venus to be a tropical paradise!



Three Soviet probes (two landers and one flyby) were launched and failed in 1962, all three re-entering earth’s atmosphere within several days of their launch. After licking their wounds, the Soviets tried again in February and March 1964, the spacecraft once again failing to leave earth orbit both times. A third probe, Zond 1, successfully left earth orbit in April, only to suffer a series of hardware failures that rendered it unable to land on Venus. While it flew by the planet at a disappointingly large distance of 110,000 km, it did send back publishable data on cosmic rays (high energy particles in the interplanetary environment).



The veil of Venus: a permanent shroud of (sulfuric acid) clouds. Courtesy of ESA

Venera 2 was not only successfully launched by the Soviets in November 1965 but passed within about 24,000 km of Venus on February 27, 1966. While it undoubtedly obtained valuable data, it was unable to share its discoveries with its creators, as contact was lost with the craft before its scheduled data relay (due to overheating of its solar panels). Venera 3 was launched only a few days after its sibling, and was intended as a lander rather than a flyby. However, communication was lost with this spacecraft as well, a few days before the probe automatically separated and touched down, the first landing of a human-created artifact on another planet. A third Soviet mission, launched the same month as its siblings, failed to leave earth orbit and re-entered our atmosphere within a month of launch.

Fast-forward to Venera 4, launched on June 12, 1967. This probe successfully entered the atmosphere of Venus on October 18, 1967 – the first probe to send back scientific data from the atmosphere of another world – but did not survive the trip all the way down, succumbing to the extreme temperature and pressure only 25 km above the surface. A US probe, Mariner 5, flew 4000 km above the surface of Venus a day later. It confirmed the hellish nature of the planet’s surface but failed to find evidence of charged particles trapped in a magnetic field (an analogy to the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding earth). We now know that Venus does not generate its own intrinsic magnetic field (like earth does) but instead has an induced field caused by the interaction with the solar wind with the planet’s upper atmosphere.

The first successful landing on Venus occurred with Venera 7, sending back 23 minutes of data from the surface on December 1970, while Venera 9 sent back photographs and 53 minutes of data from Hades I mean Venus on October 22, 1975. Of course, there were a number of “oops” interspersed in between these successes.



Postcards from Venus. Top: Venera 9; Bottom: Venera 10. Courtesy of NASA.

So why the morbid curiosity with failed Venusian probes launched in the 1960s, besides the fact that most of them re-entered earth’s atmosphere and burned up?

Between July 1967 and January 1968 George Romero filmed what became one of the most iconic horror movies of all times, Night of the Living Dead, in rural Butler County, Pennsylvania. As the film unfolds, the main characters, trapped in the farmhouse, try to piece together what is causing the epidemic of violence, hoping that the information will help them survive. The discovery of a television in an upstairs bedroom offers the characters – and the viewers – isolated bits of information, including a possible connection to the “recent Explorer satellite shot to Venus” that “started back to earth but never got here,” instead being “purposefully destroyed” after orbiting Venus when it was discovered to be carrying a “mysterious high-level radiation.” A NASA scientist leaving a meeting of the President’s cabinet offers that there is a “definite connection” between the explosion of the probe and its “unusual amount of radiation” (which he believes to be more than enough to cause significant mutations) and the zombie outbreak, while a military leader disagrees.


Given the history of Venus exploration detailed above (including the propensity of Venus-bound probes to re-enter earth’s atmosphere, albeit long before encountering the second rock from the sun), it is not surprising that Romero included this extraterrestrial explanation for the zombie outbreak. The intentional inclusion of a strange “radiation” is even more understandable given the timing of the film in the height of the Cold War and the Space Race. As explained by Glenn Kay, zombie films of the 1950s and 1960s openly drew upon societal anxieties concerning “atomic scares and alien menaces.” Clearly a “mysterious high-level radiation” from space is the perfect storm in this regard. But it wasn’t merely in fiction that such anxieties were stoked. A 1967 Universal Newsreel story from Jet Propulsion Laboratories in California concerning Mariner 5 discussed the discoveries from Venus against suspenseful background music reminiscent of any horror film. Among the claims is that Mariner “probed the radioactivity of Venus, to determine the possibility of man landing there,” rather sloppy reporting of the search for radiation belts around the planet described above. As I described in a recent blog post, the public’s misconceptions about “radiation” are well-known, and can be easily exploited by both Hollywood executives and newsroom producers to fit their needs.


A low-tech reconstruction of Mariner 5, from the Universal Newsreel

Interestingly, George Romero later regretted the presumed certainty of the space radiation as the cause of the zombie outbreak, explaining in an interview that there were actually "three proposed causes, and we cut two of them out because the scenes were boring and the scenes around them were boring, and that one we left in because it was part of that newscast and it made it seem a little bigger."

Regardless of Romero’s intention, his zombies are now counted among the archetype of what Margaret Twohy calls the “contamination zombie,” in which the animation of the dead is caused by some external agent (a parasite, a pathogen, or, as in the case of NotLD, radiation) infiltrating the body and contaminating it.

I therefore fully expect there to be some “tinfoil hat” claims regarding the supposed danger of Kosmos 482’s re-entry, certainly coming to an Internet near you. I offer all of this information so that you, too, can join the joyous game of pseudoscience whack-a-mole. Now if I could just remember – am I supposed to wear it shiny side in or shiny side out?


References:

Kay, Glenn (2008) Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide. Chicago: Chicago Review Press.

Siddiqi, Asif A. (2002). Deep Space Chronicle: A Chronology of Deep Space and Planetary Probes 1958-2000 (PDF). Monographs in Aerospace History, No. 24. NASA History Office.

Twohy, Margaret (2008) “From Voodoo to Viruses: The Evolution of the Zombie in 20th Century Popular Culture.” MPh. Thesis, Trinity College, Dublin.

If you are interested in more discussion of science phobias and science fiction, see the following three of my works:

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