Abstract
Cosmos 482 (1972-23A) was launched on 31 March 1972. Although an escape trajectory to Venus was intended, the escape manoeuvre failed and the vehicle remained in a high-drag elliptical orbit about the Earth with a perigee height of 205 km, an apogee height of 9805 km and an orbital inclination of 52. The orbit has been determined previously by King-Hele and Winterbottom (1985, Planet. Space Sci. 33, 1125) at 77 epochs, and a subset of 46 of these orbits is used in this paper to determine thermospheric density values at heights near 220 km. One hundred and twenty-six such density values are obtained for the period August 1979 February 1981. Standardized to a fixed height of 222 km, and corrected for variations in exospheric temperature, these values reveal the semi-annual variation in density which is discussed and compared with standard atmospheric models.
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