The 22-year-old Swift satellite telescope of the U.S. space agency NASA plunged into Earth's atmosphere over Indonesia on Wednesday, burning up after a failed rescue attempt.
The U.S. Space Force confirmed the reentry over northern Sumatra at 7:39 a.m. Eastern time, tracking the observatory's sinking orbit caused by intense solar activity in recent years. The 1.5-ton spacecraft entered the upper atmosphere at roughly 22 times the speed of sound, and most of it disintegrated during descent, though NASA anticipated some denser components might survive. Due to its orbital inclination, debris could only fall between 20.6 degrees north and south latitude, and the agency had calculated a 1-in-2,100 probability that debris would injure someone.
The fall came less than three months after NASA abandoned an unprecedented rescue effort, launching in July a $30 million robotic spacecraft named Link, built by Katalyst Space, to boost Swift's orbit. The 400-kilogram craft, equipped with three robotic arms, launched from a Marshall Islands atoll aboard a Pegasus rocket dropped from a Stargazer aircraft. It suffered control problems shortly after reaching space and crashed in September.
Launched in 2004 for a planned two-year mission, Swift observed more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and 1,400 supernovas over 22 years, serving as a first responder for other telescopes. In 2005, it recorded the afterglow of a 0.03-second short gamma-ray burst, supporting the theory that such explosions originate from merging neutron stars. Its data appeared in roughly 7,000 scientific articles, and its public archive holds 12 terabytes including 1.5 million images, while NASA now seeks ways to cover Swift's rapid-response capability with other missions. "The Swift leaves us an extraordinary archive of multi-wavelength observations that will drive new discoveries for decades," said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division.
NASA is now soliciting proposals from private companies to rescue the Hubble Space Telescope, whose orbit is also being eroded by solar storms. Launched in 1990, Hubble is expected to re-enter by the mid-2030s, and any mission would need to occur by 2032, with options including boosting its orbit, upgrading systems, or guiding a controlled reentry. Unlike the rush job with Swift, NASA has more time to explore options, said Nicky Fox, the agency's science mission chief. "Hubble still has important science ahead of it," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said, "and we should be looking at every reasonable opportunity to keep it delivering for as long as possible."
