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It is the latest in a parade of spacecraft falling from the sky in what are worryingly called “uncontrolled entries.” About 100 tons of debris will fall from the sky this year alone. There are, however, no known instances in which anyone has been injured by space debris.

“It’s rather hard to predict where the spacecraft will re-enter and impact,” said Rune Floberghagen, the mission manager for the European Space Agency’s Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer, or GOCE. “Concretely our best engineering prediction is now for a re-entry on Sunday, with a possibility for it slipping into early Monday.”

GOCE (pronounced GO-chay) ran out of propellant last month and has been dropping about 2.5 miles a day. As of Wednesday, it was still 113 miles up as it circled the Earth once every 88 minutes. Its orbit goes almost directly over the poles, and as the planet rotates, almost all places on Earth pass beneath it at some point.

Two years ago, NASA’s decommissioned Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, tumbling out of control, worried people around the world until it splashed harmlessly in the Pacific. Later that year, the Russian spacecraft Phobos-Grunt launched into orbit, but then malfunctioned. Instead of heading toward Mars, it crashed back to Earth a couple of months later, again falling in the Pacific without incident.

The chances that a chunk of GOCE or any other space debris will injure anyone are tiny, but not zero. Dr. Floberghagen said the debris will endanger about 15 to 20 square yards of the Earth’s surface. “If you compare that to the surface of the planet, it’s a very small number,” he said.

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