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NASA’s Swift space telescope, which spent 22 years hunting cosmic explosions, is expected to fall out of orbit and burn up on or around Friday, after a rescue mission failed.
The U.S. Space Force is tracking the one-and-a-half-ton Swift Observatory as it sinks closer to Earth.
Most of the spacecraft will burn up in the atmosphere, but a few pieces could reach the surface.
NASA’s Brad Cenko, the mission’s chief scientist, said a handful of parts made of tungsten, a metal denser than lead, and some mirror components may survive reentry.
Any debris will most likely land in the ocean. However, the reentry zone also covers large areas of Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America.
Strong solar activity in recent years has pulled Swift down faster than expected.
About a year ago, NASA hired Katalyst Space to attempt a rush rescue. The company’s three-armed robot, called Link, launched in July but ran into trouble and never got closer than about 7 to 9 miles (12 to 15 kilometers) from the telescope. Link fell back to Earth in September.
After the rescue attempt was called off, Swift kept working and found even more gamma-ray bursts and other ultrahigh-energy events.
By late October, though, it had dropped too low to stay steady, and its systems were shut down.
Swift launched on Nov. 20, 2004, to search for gamma-ray bursts and supernovas, some of the biggest explosions in the universe.
Its final tally includes more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and 1,400 exploding stars. It also observed many comets, asteroids, and black holes tearing apart stars. Its signature skill was swiveling quickly toward new cosmic events, which gave the telescope its name.
NASA saw Swift as a first responder for other observatories, including the Hubble and Webb space telescopes. They followed its alerts to study events in greater depth. Scientists are still working out how to fill the gap it leaves.
The Swift team is sad to see it go but grateful for its discoveries. "We’ve known this day would come since before Swift was launched," said John Nousek, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University who led the control team.
"At least in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down."
Nousek said in an email that he hopes lessons from Swift’s successes will help speed up discoveries by future space missions.
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