The satellite about to crash to Earth in coming days

A satellite that's no longer in use is expected to come splashing down into the ocean in the coming days.

The European Space Agency (ESA) satellite, called ERS-2 satellite, launched in 1995 on a mission to observe Earth which was completed in 2011.

Ahead of its mission end, the ESA prepared for the satellite to eventually crash back down to Earth - by using engine burns to move it nearer to our planet and to avoid other objects currently in orbit.

Now, 13 years later, the craft is about to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere.

Satellite to burn up and crash in the ocean

Launched 29 years ago ERS-2 was described by the ESA as Europe's most sophisticated Earth observation satellite.

Had it been allowed to spin around the Earth, it would have taken between 100 - 200 years to eventually re-enter the atmosphere and may have been a risk to other objects such as satellites and the International Space Station (ISS).

Most of the satellite, which weighs 2.5 tonnes - about one-and-a-half times the weight of a car - will burn up in the atmosphere.

Anything that does survive the fireball as it plummets towards the Earth is expected to land in the ocean.

"The odds of a piece of satellite falling on someone's head is estimated at one in a billion," said Benjamin Bastida Virgili, an ESA space debris engineer who says people shouldn't be worried.