These pieces of debris will likely be scattered over a 500-mile (804-kilometer) long path. But agency officials have been quick to stress that there is very little chance that satellite chunks will smash into towns or cities.

Instead, it's much more likely that the debris will fall over water or remote, uninhabited areas, NASA officials said.

"There's always a concern," Matney said. "But, populated areas are a small fraction of the Earth's surface. Much of the Earth's surface has either no people or very few people. We believe that the risk is very modest."

For comparison, when NASA's space shuttle Columbia tragically broke apart during re-entry in 2003, debris from the 100-ton spacecraft was scattered across Texas, but did not damage any structures or injure any people.

"When [Columbia] came back, as the shuttle heated up, it broke into pieces — some of them very large, and some very small," Williamson said. "Even then, there was difficulty in trying to find the pieces that were spread over such a large area. It was such an unpopulated area that it was very difficult to locate all the pieces, even though they knew from videos pretty much precisely the track that it followed across the atmosphere."

NASA has calculated the odds of anyone anywhere in the world being hit by a piece of the UARS satellite at 1 in 3,200. But, the chance that you personally will get hit is much more remote, on the order of 1inseveral trillion, Williamson said.

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