Nasa satellite plunging to Earth: how to avoid fiery death

A satellite the size of a bus, travelling at about four and a half miles a second, is going to plunge out of orbit in the next few hours and shower fiery debris over the planet.

Here are a few thoughts on how to minimise your risk of searing death by falling spacecraft.

1) Don't go outside. There is, according to Nasa, about a one in 3,200 chance of the satellite hitting a human being. That sounds a little alarming. But, since the area of the Earth's surface that lies within the range of possible crash sites is home to some number of billions of people, the chances of you, you personally, being hit by a falling solar panel are rather larger: in the region of one in 21,000,000,000,000, according to some estimates. If you're worried about death by satellite, you'll be absolutely terrified of your one in 157,680,000,000* chance of being killed by a car in any given minute – more than 133 times as likely as being hit by falling debris. That outside world is a scary place.

*Based on 1.2 million deaths per year on the roads worldwide (correct 2004) and world population of six billion people

2) Don't stand up. According to the US Centre for Disease Control, accidental falls cause 7.5 deaths per year per 100,000 population. That's a one in 420,480,000,000 chance of falling over and dying every minute of every day. You're fifty times as likely to die from simply being on your feet for a minute than you are walking up and down in the satellite's flight path wearing a big magnetic hat and shouting "Satellites are cissies".

3) Don't eat sushi. Or, really, any food at all. Or use the toaster, or have a bath, or go to sleep. You can see where I'm going with this.

4) If you're really worried, don't move to northern Italy. Not because the satellite is most likely to crash there (although it is – 1.5 per cent chance, apparently) but because the drive to the airport is almost infinitely more likely to kill you than the satellite is. The flight will actually be comparatively safe (relative to the trip to Heathrow, not the risk of falling spacecraft).

5) What you really should do, though, is go outside and watch; if you're lucky, you'll see it as a shooting star at about 9pm, as – in the words of Sq Comm Ralph Dinsley, station commander at RAF Fylingdales, who is tracking its progress on the radar – it hits the atmosphere and bounces "like skipping a stone across a pond".