NASA's Swift Observatory is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere on or around Friday, according to a U.S. Space Force prediction cited by BusinessLine. The telescope, launched in 2004, has spent 22 years in orbit and is now descending without control after an attempted rescue fell short.
Most of the roughly 1.5-ton spacecraft should burn up during reentry. However, BusinessLine reports that certain components — including parts made of tungsten, a metal denser than lead, and some mirror pieces — may survive the fall. Brad Cenko, the mission's chief scientist at NASA, is the source for that assessment.
Why it matters
Swift was built to catch the universe's most violent events as they happened. Over its lifetime it logged more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and 1,400 exploding stars, along with numerous comets, asteroids and black holes caught tearing stars apart, according to BusinessLine.
Its defining capability was speed of response: the observatory could swing around quickly to point at sudden eruptions, which is where its name came from. NASA treated Swift as a first responder for other observatories, including Hubble and Webb, which followed up on its alerts with closer study. With Swift gone, BusinessLine reports that scientists are still working out how to cover that gap.
A mission that outlived its welcome in orbit
Swift lifted off on November 20, 2004, tasked with hunting gamma-ray bursts and supernovas — some of the largest explosions known in the universe. It kept working long past its planned lifetime, but intense solar activity in recent years pulled it down faster than expected, BusinessLine reports.
That decline prompted NASA to hire Katalyst Space about a year ago for an urgent rescue attempt. The company built a three-armed robot called Link, which launched in July but ran into problems and never got closer than 12 to 15 kilometres from the telescope, according to BusinessLine. Link itself fell back to Earth in September.
After the rescue was abandoned, Swift briefly returned to work, finding still more gamma-ray bursts and other high-energy events. By late October it had dropped too low to hold steady for observations, and its systems were shut down, BusinessLine reports.
John Nousek, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University who led the control team, told BusinessLine in an email that the mission's end was always anticipated. He described the reentry as catastrophic and said the team had known since before launch that anything in low-Earth orbit eventually comes down.
Where the debris could land
The Space Force is tracking the telescope's decaying path. BusinessLine reports that surviving fragments are most likely to fall into the ocean, but that parts of Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America lie within the reentry zone.
Nousek said the Swift team is grieving the loss while remaining grateful for what the telescope delivered over more than two decades. He added that the team hopes the lessons from Swift's successes can be carried into future space missions and speed up new discoveries about the universe.
The coming days will show whether the Space Force's predicted window holds; until then, the telescope's path remains the thing to watch.
