Want to spy on a spy in the sky before it gets shot down by the U.S. government?

Between 6:26 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday, the ill-fated spy satellite USA 193 should be visible to Atlantans if skies are clear and you use binoculars to scan the south/southeast horizon. The satellite can be tracked for about four minutes as it moves to the east/northeast.

That is the prediction posted Saturday on the Germany-based Web site www.heavens-above.com that tracks, with a group of sky watchers around the globe about 140 classified U.S. satellites and other man-made craft orbiting Earth.

Just so you'll know roughly what to look for, there's a blurry photo of the satellite posted on the Web site of Galaxy Picture Library, www.galaxypix.com

The photo was taken last month by amateur English astronomer John Locker with an $80 Web cam and telescope while standing in the back yard of his home in Wirral, in northwest England, according to the publication skymania.com.

Those elements just add more intrigue to the life and death story of a satellite that became news Thursday when national security officials said they planned to shoot it down, sometime after next Wednesday, with anti-ballistic missiles fired from a Navy cruiser in the Pacific Ocean.

The government reported last month that the bus-sized satellite was unresponsive and out of control. The reason for shooting it down, Pentagon officials said Thursday, was that it is carrying 1,000 pounds of toxic hydrazine, a fuel.

If the container holding the hydrazine stayed intact during fiery reentry to earth it could leak and cause potentially fatal injury over an area the size of two football fields, said Deputy National Security Advisor James Jeffrey.

Officials haven't revealed much about the satellite except to acknowledge it is a spy satellite and that "we cannot predict the entry impact area."

The most famous incident of an American satellite crashing to earth was Skylab, which plunged into the Indian Ocean on July 11, 1979, after six years in orbit.

Nobody was hit or hurt. But debris also fell on Western Australia, and one small town, Shire of Esperance, reportedly fined the United States $400 for littering.

The Heavens-Above Web site offers more, unconfirmed, information about the spy bird. According to its profile of "Decaying Spy Satellite USA 193," the satellite was launched in secret atop a Delta II rocket on Dec. 14, 2006, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

"The exact design and purpose of USA 193 are, of course, closely guarded secrets," reads the profile. "But specialists believe it is probably a high resolution radar satellite which was intended to produce images for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)."

A graph on the Web site shows how badly the satellite's orbit has decayed since March 2007, when it orbited about 217 miles above earth.

By last week, the satellite was losing altitude about a rate of almost one mile a day. Toronto, Canada based-satellite tracker, Ted Molczan has predicted that if the satellite isn't shot down, it would probably crash around March 18, when its orbital altitude will have fallen to about 62 miles.

The response to the government's stated reason for shooting down the satellite has been mixed. None dispute that Hydrazine is dangerous to humans who come in contact with it. There are, however, acceptable levels of exposure to the chemical, which also is used in manufacturing such things as carpeting.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration limits the amount of hydrazine in workplace air to 0.1 parts per million during an 8-hour day, and warns of the potential of absorbing the chemical through the skin.

The Food and Drug Administration warns against letting hydrazine come into contact with food, and restricts the amount that can be released into the environment during burying or by disposal in landfills.

Many skeptics theorize the real reason the government is going to great expense to shoot down USA 193 is because it fears the satellite will crash in the wrong place — Russia or China — where secrets could be mined from the charred remains.

Michael Krepon, co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based Henry L. Stimson Center, an arms-control advocacy group, said Friday he believes the Pentagon is using the "safety" issue as an excuse so it can test its missile defense system's ability to shoot down a satellite.

"Otherwise, they might have a hard time pulling this off," said Krepon. "But as it is, you don't hear any cries from Congress, do you?"

Tom Gehrels, the former head of the University of Arizona's Spacewatch Project, which tracks asteroids that are a threat to earth, said shooting down the satellite makes sense to him.

"I'm glad to hear it," he said. "Only one person we know for certain has ever been hit by something from space — that woman in Alabama hit with a meteorite in 1956. But all these satellites? After Australia, you never know."