When Swift was launched<\/a> in 2004, it was designed for a two-year prime mission. Since then, it has played a major role in advancing humanity’s understanding of the universe, the director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Swift has observed more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts, the purpose for which it was designed, but it also studied over 1,400 supernova explosions, witnessed black holes shred stars, monitored active galaxies, conducted an all-sky X-ray survey, studied asteroids, comets, and more.<\/p>\n Some 7,000 published scientific papers built off of Swift data.<\/p>\n Gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe, reach their peak brightness in less than two seconds. Before Swift was launched, it had been impossible to locate the bursts rapidly and precisely enough to observe their afterglows.<\/p>\n \u201cSwift was designed as a satellite dedicated to studying gamma-ray bursts, outbursts that came and went so quickly that no one could target them with large telescopes to learn more,\u201d said S. Bradley Cenko, the mission\u2019s principal investigator at NASA<\/a>\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.<\/p>\n \u201cSwift needed to detect and locate gamma-ray bursts, communicate their position to other observatories, and then swing its telescopes around to image the burst locations before their afterglows faded out. This typically took Swift about a minute to do.\u201d<\/p>\nHigh resolution still of the Andromeda Galaxy as seen by the Swift satellite in UV light. (credit: NASA\/Swift\/Stefan Immler (GSFC) and Erin Grand (UMCP))Swift captures the birth of black holes<\/p>\n