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Black Sea Adventurers Plan Reed Boat Trip to Egypt

A team, led by German explorer Dominique Goertlitz, assembles a 14-meter long reed boat in the town of Beloslav, Bulgaria, July 3, 2019. Picture taken July 3, 2019. REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov
A team, led by German explorer Dominique Goertlitz, assembles a 14-meter long reed boat in the town of Beloslav, Bulgaria, July 3, 2019. Picture taken July 3, 2019. REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov
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Black Sea Adventurers Plan Reed Boat Trip to Egypt

A team, led by German explorer Dominique Goertlitz, assembles a 14-meter long reed boat in the town of Beloslav, Bulgaria, July 3, 2019. Picture taken July 3, 2019. REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov
A team, led by German explorer Dominique Goertlitz, assembles a 14-meter long reed boat in the town of Beloslav, Bulgaria, July 3, 2019. Picture taken July 3, 2019. REUTERS/Stoyan Nenov

Adventurers are getting ready to set off on a 3,000-km voyage in a reed boat to test a theory that ancient Egyptian merchants used such as vessels to travel as far as the Black Sea, Reuters reported.

A crew led by German explorer Dominique Goеrlitz is planning to leave the Black Sea port of Varna next month, then try to island-hop around the Aegean and cross the Mediterranean to Alexandria.

The boat Abora IV is still being built in the nearby town of Beloslav, with the help of two members of the Aymara ethnic group from Bolivia - Fermin Limachi and his son Yuri who have flown in to share their expertise using the fragile material.

According to Reuters, Goеrlitz said the Ancient Greek historian Heroditus had cited even older sources suggesting Egyptians "sailed into the Black Sea, to get precious materials they could not find in the Eastern Mediterranean".

The accounts were supported, he said, by the discovery of Egyptian remains around the Black Sea.

Other members of the Aymara group, who live on Lake Titicaca high in the Andes, were involved in earlier Abora expeditions to other destinations and helped Norwegian writer Thor Heyerdahl, who crossed the Pacific in the "Kon-Tiki" balsa-reed raft in 1947.

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Soviet-Era Spacecraft Is Expected to Plummet to Earth This Weekend after 53 Years

This photo provided by researcher Jane Greaves shows the planet Venus, seen from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki probe in May 2016. (J. Greaves/Cardiff University/JAXA via AP)
This photo provided by researcher Jane Greaves shows the planet Venus, seen from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki probe in May 2016. (J. Greaves/Cardiff University/JAXA via AP)
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Soviet-Era Spacecraft Is Expected to Plummet to Earth This Weekend after 53 Years

This photo provided by researcher Jane Greaves shows the planet Venus, seen from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki probe in May 2016. (J. Greaves/Cardiff University/JAXA via AP)
This photo provided by researcher Jane Greaves shows the planet Venus, seen from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Akatsuki probe in May 2016. (J. Greaves/Cardiff University/JAXA via AP)

A half-ton Soviet spacecraft that never made it to Venus 53 years ago is expected to fall back to Earth this weekend.

Built to land on the solar system's hottest planet, the titanium-covered spacecraft may survive its fiery, uncontrolled plunge through Earth's atmosphere, predicted to occur on Saturday. But experts said it likely would come down over water, covering most of the world, or a desolate region.

The odds of it slamming into a populated area are “infinitesimally small,” said University of Colorado Boulder scientist Marcin Pilinski.

“While we can anticipate that most of this object will not burn up in the atmosphere during reentry, it may be severely damaged on impact,” Pilinski said in an email.

By Friday, all indications pointed to a reentry early Saturday morning, US Eastern Time, give or take several hours. While space debris trackers around the world converged in their forecasts, it was still too soon to know exactly when and where the spacecraft known as Kosmos 482 would come down. That uncertainty was due to potential solar activity and the spacecraft’s old condition. Its parachutes were expected to be useless by now and its batteries long dead.

Dutch scientist Marco Langbroek estimated the impact speed at 150 mph (242 kph) if the spacecraft remains intact.

The Soviets launched Kosmos 482 in 1972, intending to send it to Venus to join other spacecraft in their Venera program. But a rocket malfunction left this one stuck in orbit around Earth. Gravity kept tugging on it and was expected to finally cause its doom.

Spherical in shape, the spacecraft — 3-foot (1-meter) across and packing more than 1,000 pounds (495 kilograms) — will be the last piece of Kosmos 482 to fall from the sky. All the other parts plummeted within a decade.

Any surviving wreckage will belong to Russia under a United Nations treaty.