It's déjà vu all over again, as Yogi Berra might have put it. This month, another defunct satellite is expected to plunge to Earth — offering us another welcome respite from worrying about our real problems.

Instead, we can worry about the fantastically slim odds of being killed by some of the debris that will be shed by Germany's ROentgen SATellite (ROSAT) X-Ray telescope on its fiery uncontrolled re-entry to Earth just before Halloween.

"It will not be possible to make any kind of reliable forecast about where the satellite will actually come down until about one or two hours before the fact," says the European Space Agency's Heiner Klinkrad, in a statement on the re-entry. "In the final phase, ROSAT will be 'caught' by the atmosphere at which point it will not even complete an orbit around the Earth: Instead, it will go into 'free fall'."