An ageing NASA telescope is barely clinging to space after a failed rescue effort left it tottering lower and lower.<\/p>\n
The US Space Force predicts the Swift Observatory will come crashing down on or around Friday.<\/p>\n
Most of the 1.5-ton telescope is expected to burn up in the atmosphere. <\/p>\n
But a handful of pieces made of denser-than-lead tungsten and some mirror parts could survive re-entry, according to NASA’s Brad Cenko, the mission\u2019s chief scientist.<\/p>\n
Any surviving wreckage will most likely plunge into the ocean. But swaths of Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America are within the re-entry zone. The Space Force is tracking the telescope\u2019s dwindling path.<\/p>\n
Its cosmic cremation has the Swift team mourning yet full of gratitude for the observations the telescope made during its 22 years in orbit. <\/p>\n
‘We’ve known this day would come.. since before launch’<\/p>\n
Swift blasted off on November 20, 2004, to search for some of the biggest explosions in the universe: gamma ray bursts and supernovas.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve known this day would come since before Swift was launched. At least in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down. And that end is catastrophic,\u201d said Pennsylvania State University\u2019s John Nousek, an astronomer who led the control team.<\/p>\n
Intense solar activity over the past few years dragged Swift down faster than usual. NASA hired Katalyst Space a year ago to mount a rush rescue. <\/p>\n
But the company\u2019s three-armed robot named Link ran into trouble after launching in July and got no closer than 12km to 15km to the telescope. <\/p>\n
Link plunged back to Earth in September.<\/p>\n
Swift resumed observations once the rescue attempt was called off, discovering even more gamma ray bursts and other ultrahigh-energy events. But by late October, the telescope was too low to remain steady for observations, and its systems were shut down.<\/p>\n
Its final tally: more than 2000 gamma ray bursts and 1400 exploding stars, not to mention a slew of comets, asteroids and star-shredding black holes. <\/p>\n
The telescope\u2019s superpower was its ability to swivel swiftly \u2014 thus its name \u2014 toward erupting celestial events.<\/p>\n
NASA considered Swift a first responder for the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and others that would follow its alerts and provide deeper investigations. <\/p>\n
Scientists are still figuring out how to fill the gap.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur fervent hope is that the lessons learned by the successes of Swift can be applied to new generations of space missions to accelerate our discoveries about the universe,\u201d Nousek said in an email.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An ageing NASA telescope is barely clinging to space after a failed rescue effort left it tottering lower…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":647624,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,64,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-647623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-north-america","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=647623"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/647623\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/647624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=647623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=647623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=647623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}