Warning : A satellite is on its way to crash into Earth within hours, and NASA reveals

A "retired" NASA satellite is set to fall from space and crash to Earth Wednesday night ET, with a 1 in 2,500 chance of killing someone.

And the US space agency revealed that the 300-kilogram satellite, which is similar to a vending machine, will enter the Earth's atmosphere at 9:30 pm ET on Wednesday, April 19 (01:30 am on Thursday, April 20 GMT), with burning Most of it is in the sky during descent.

Some of its components are expected to survive combustion, but the US space agency says in a statement that "the risk of harm to anyone on Earth is low - about 1 in 2,467 possibilities."

Neither NASA nor the US Department of Defense has announced the exact return point of the satellite called the Rufin Ramati High Energy Spectroscopic Imager Solar Imaging, known as RHESSI.

NASA will post updates about the spacecraft after it crashes to Earth and spends more than two decades in orbit.

RHESSI was first launched into low Earth orbit in 2002, aboard a Pegasus XL rocket from Orbital Sciences Corporation. He worked to observe solar flares and coronal mass ejections that helped scientists investigate the physics of the sun's energy explosions, before shutting it down in 2018 after NASA failed to communicate with him.

Using an imaging spectrometer, RHESSI recorded about 100,000 X-ray events, according to NASA, as well as gamma-ray images. This was the first time that high-energy gamma-ray and X-ray images of solar flares had been captured.

The RHESSI record will be the second "retired" NASA satellite to crash into Earth this year. Last January, NASA announced that a 38-year-old satellite, weighing 2,540 kg, would return to Earth.

NASA estimated in 2021 that about 27,000 pieces of space junk are floating in orbit, not including debris that is too small to monitor.

Space debris regularly falls to Earth, including a 21-ton Chinese rocket that fell to Earth in May 2022.

According to NASA, the higher the orbital debris, the longer it takes to return to Earth. Returning debris from altitudes of 600 km or less can take "several years", but "orbital decay" at an altitude of 800 km can take centuries to occur.

At an altitude of 1,000 km, the orbital debris will continue to "revolve around the Earth for a thousand years or more."