NASA's Swift Observatory to Re-Enter Atmosphere After Failed Rescue Attempt
NASA confirmed that the Swift space telescope, whose orbit is decaying, will likely burn up upon re-entry later this year after a rescue mission failed, and it has released new astronomical images.
NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, launched in 2004 to detect gamma-ray bursts, is now in a rapidly decaying low-Earth orbit due to increased solar activity. The 1,470-kg, 5.6-meter telescope, currently about 200 miles above Earth, is expected to re-enter the atmosphere later this year, possibly in November, and is likely to break up and largely burn up.
A rescue effort using Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft attempted to raise Swift to a higher orbit over the summer, but an attitude-control problem prevented the vehicle from capturing the observatory, leading to the mission's failure.
On Thursday, NASA released a new set of images captured by Swift and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, showcasing objects such as the Small Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy about 200,000 light-years away, and NGC 1097, a spiral galaxy roughly 48 million light-years distant that hosts a supermassive black hole estimated at 140 million solar masses.
NASA has not confirmed whether any debris from Swift's re-entry will reach the Earth's surface.