CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA's Swift Observatory, a telescope that spent 22 years studying some of the most energetic events in the universe, is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere on or around Friday, officials said.
The 1.5-ton spacecraft, launched in November 2004 to detect gamma-ray bursts and supernovas, saw its orbital decay accelerated by intense solar activity in recent years, dragging it down faster than natural decay alone would predict.
NASA hired private company Katalyst Space approximately a year ago to attempt a rescue mission. The company's three-armed robot, named Link, launched in July and approached to within 7 to 15 kilometers of the telescope but was unable to make contact or secure it. Link plunged back to Earth in September after the rescue effort was called off.
With the rescue attempt abandoned, Swift continued observations until late October, when its orbit decayed to approximately 171 kilometers, rendering it unstable for science operations. The telescope was officially shut down shortly after.
Most of the observatory will burn up during re-entry, but NASA says some denser tungsten components and mirror fragments may survive the heat. Any surviving debris is expected to land in the ocean within a predicted zone that includes parts of Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America.
The U.S. Space Force is tracking the telescope's final descent path. Its cosmic mission ended with a tally of more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and 1,400 exploding stars, not to mention comets, asteroids and star-shredding black holes.
"We've known this day would come since before Swift was launched. At least in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down," said John Nousek, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University who led the mission's control team.
Swift served as a first responder for the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and others that followed its alerts for deeper investigations. Scientists are still figuring out how to fill the gap left by its retirement.
"Our fervent hope is that the lessons learned by the successes of Swift can be applied to new generations of space missions to accelerate our discoveries about the universe," Nousek said.
