NASA's Swift telescope burns up over Indonesia after 22 years

A failed rescue attempt

Swift's science mission had already ended days earlier. Its last observation of the sky took place on 20 October, when the telescope was at an altitude of 275 km. At that height it could no longer compensate for atmospheric drag and went into safe mode. Three days later, NASA said it had "closed the eyes" of Swift by switching off its instruments.

A few months earlier, NASA had tried to save the telescope with LINK, a space tug built by the US company Katalyst Space and launched on 3 July. LINK was supposed to lift Swift to a more suitable orbit at 600 km, but technical problems, including an uncontrolled spin of the tug, prevented it, and NASA abandoned the rescue.

NASA expected most of the spacecraft to burn up during reentry, although some components may have survived. Swift weighed about 1,450 kg. Before the fall, the agency put the risk of a person being hit by debris at roughly 1 in 2,100. Because of Swift's low orbital inclination, any fragments could only have landed between 20.6 degrees south and 20.6 degrees north latitude.

Far beyond its planned lifetime

Swift launched in 2004 with a two-year primary mission to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions known in the Universe. It ended up serving for more than two decades as what NASA calls a versatile tool for exploring the cosmos. It was used to study galaxies powered by supermassive black holes, supernovae, and comets and asteroids in the Solar System.