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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA’s aging telescope is barely hanging on in space after a failed rescue attempt left it teetering ever lower.
The US Space Force estimates the Swift Observatory will collapse on or around Friday.
Most telescopes weighing 1 1/2 tons are expected to burn up in the atmosphere. But some pieces made of tungsten, which is denser than lead, and some parts of the mirror could survive reentry, according to NASA’s Brad Cenko, the mission’s chief scientist.
Surviving debris will likely plunge into the sea. However, most of Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia and Central and South America are in the re-entry zone. The Space Force is tracking the telescope’s diminishing path.
His cosmic cremation made the Swift team both grieve and grateful for the observations made by the telescope during its 22 years in orbit. Swift was launched on November 20, 2004, to search for some of the largest explosions in the universe: gamma-ray bursts and supernovae.
“We’ve known this day would happen since before Swift launched. At least in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down. And the ending was catastrophic,” said John Nousek of Pennsylvania State University, the astronomer who led the control team.
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Intense solar activity over the past few years is dragging Swift down faster than usual. NASA hired Katalyst Space a year ago to perform emergency rescues. But the company’s three-arm robot called Link ran into problems after it launched in July and came no closer than 7 miles to 9 miles (12 kilometers to 15 kilometers) from the telescope. Link falls back to Earth in September.
Swift continued its observations after the rescue attempt was called off, and discovered many more gamma-ray bursts and other ultrahigh energy events. But in late October, the telescope was too low to remain stable in observations, and the system shut down.
The final tally: more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and 1,400 exploding stars, not to mention scores of star-destroying comets, asteroids and black holes. The telescope’s superpower is its ability to spin rapidly — as the name suggests — toward erupting celestial events.
NASA considers Swift a first responder for the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and other telescopes that will heed its warning and conduct deeper probes. Scientists are still looking for ways to fill the gap.
“Our greatest hope is that the learnings from Swift’s success can be applied to a new generation of space missions to accelerate our discovery of the universe,” Nousek said by email.
© 2026 Canadian Press
