An old NASA telescope is barely clinging to space after a botched rescue effort left it increasingly wobbly. The space agency said Monday that it predicts the Swift Observatory will likely collapse on Wednesday. Most of the 1.5-ton telescope is expected to burn up in the atmosphere. But a handful of pieces made of tungsten denser than lead and some mirror parts could survive reentry, according to Brad Cenko, NASA’s chief scientist for the mission. “As of Monday, the US Space Force predicted that the approximately 3,200-pound spacecraft will re-enter the atmosphere at approximately 3:30 a.m. EST on November 4, with an uncertainty of 11 hours,” NASA said Monday. The surviving wreckage will most likely sink into the ocean. But swaths of Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia and Central and South America are within the reentry zone. The US Space Force is following the telescope’s dwindling trajectory. In a statement Monday, NASA said that “the risk of harm to anyone on Earth is unlikely”: about 1 in 2,100. “NASA and the Space Force will continue to monitor reentry and update predictions,” the agency said. NASA Swift Observatory His cosmic cremation has the Swift team in mourning, but full of gratitude, for the observations the telescope made during its 22 years in orbit. Swift took off on November 20, 2004 to search for some of the biggest explosions in the universe: gamma ray bursts and supernovae. “We knew this day would come before Swift launched. At least in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down. And that end is catastrophic,” said John Nousek of Pennsylvania State University, an astronomer who led the monitoring team. Intense solar activity in recent years swept Swift away faster than usual. NASA hired Katalyst Space a year ago to organize an urgent rescue. But the company’s three-armed robot called Link ran into trouble after its launch in July and didn’t get closer than 7 to 9 miles to the telescope. Link returned to Earth in September. Swift resumed observations once the rescue attempt was called off, discovering even more gamma-ray bursts and other ultra-high-energy events. But in late October, the telescope was too low to remain stable during observations and its systems were shut down. Their final tally: more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and 1,400 exploding stars, not to mention a host of comets, asteroids, and star-destroying black holes. The telescope’s superpower was its ability to rotate rapidly (hence its name) towards erupting celestial events. Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s Astrophysics Division, told “CBS Mornings” in June that nothing identifies gamma-ray bursts better than the Swift Observatory. “The explosion of a nuclear weapon doesn’t even compare to the magnitude of the energy that comes out of these things and is literally the largest explosion in the universe,” Domagal-Goldman said. NASA considered Swift the first responder for the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and others that would follow its alerts and provide deeper investigations. Scientists are still figuring out how to fill this gap. “Our fervent hope is that the lessons learned from Swift’s successes can be applied to new generations of space missions to accelerate our discoveries about the universe,” Nousek said in an email. Go deeper with The Free Press on:
