Swift Observatory forecast to crash to Earth around Friday after failed rescue

Tungsten pieces could survive reentry, but ocean splashdown remains most likely

NASA’s Swift Observatory is barely clinging to space after a failed rescue effort, and the U.S. Space Force predicts the aging telescope will come crashing down on or around Friday.

Most of the 1½-ton telescope is expected to burn up in the atmosphere. But Brad Cenko, NASA’s chief scientist for the mission, said a handful of pieces made of denser-than-lead tungsten, along with some mirror parts, could survive reentry.

Any surviving wreckage will most likely plunge into the ocean. Still, swaths of Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America are within the reentry zone, and the Space Force is tracking the telescope’s dwindling path.

Intense solar activity over the past few years dragged Swift down faster than usual. NASA hired Katalyst Space a year ago to mount a rush rescue.

The company’s three-armed robot, named Link, ran into trouble after launching in July and got no closer than 7 miles to 9 miles (12 kilometers to 15 kilometers) to the telescope. Link plunged back to Earth in September.

Swift resumed observations once the rescue attempt was called off, discovering even more gamma ray bursts and other ultrahigh-energy events. By late October, the telescope was too low to remain steady for observations, and its systems were shut down.

The observatory blasted off on Nov. 20, 2004, to search for some of the biggest explosions in the universe: gamma ray bursts and supernovas. Its final tally includes more than 2,000 gamma ray bursts and 1,400 exploding stars, as well as a slew of comets, asteroids and star-shredding black holes. Swift’s signature ability was its quick swivel toward erupting celestial events — the trait that gave the telescope its name.

The end has left the Swift team mourning even as its members express gratitude for 22 years of observations. “We’ve known this day would come since before Swift was launched. At least in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down. And that end is catastrophic,” said Pennsylvania State University’s John Nousek, an astronomer who led the control team.

NASA considered Swift a first responder for the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and other observatories that would follow its alerts and provide deeper investigations. Scientists are still figuring out how to fill the gap.

“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 in an email.