Broken up pieces of a retired German satellite are expected to plummet to earth, pretty much anywhere, sometime between Friday and Monday. The satellite, which is the size of a minivan, was launched in 1990 and retired in 1999, and the German space agency lost contact with it a while ago, as the Associated Press reports. It's expected to re-enter the atmosphere at 17,400 mph, and scientists expect to spot it and be able to kind of predict where it will land within about a 10-hour window of impact, but at the moment they have no clue.

This news comes just a month after a retired NASA satellite fell into the Pacific Ocean, causing no damage but making a bunch of headlines. In the case of this German piece of trash, the chances of it hitting someone, somewhere on the planet, are 1 in 2,000.

It's comforting, right, that there's all of this space junk falling from the sky that nobody really had a clean-up plan for?

[AP/Ex]