The risk of a re-entry accident grows over the longer term, which is why designing satellites to come down safely matters more and more
Nasa’s Swift satellite telescope has fallen from orbit and burned up in Earth’s atmosphere over Indonesia, according to the US space agency. The satellite, which spent two decades studying powerful blasts of energy in the cosmos, tumbled out of orbit as expected on Wednesday.
The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, weighing roughly 3,200 pounds, came to a fiery end less than three months after a rescue spacecraft failed its mission to boost the satellite to higher orbit and extend its life. The US Space Force confirmed that Swift’s re-entry occurred at 7.39am over Indonesia’s North Sumatra province.
Nasa said it expected the frictional heat of re-entry would incinerate most of the satellite well above Earth’s surface, with some fragments surviving the plunge. However, the US space agency reported no damage or injuries on the ground from falling debris. The population of North Sumatra province totals around 16 million, with the capital and largest city, Medan, home to about 2.5 million people.
Dean Sladen, an aerospace engineer, said before re-entry that only a handful of small, scorched fragments were expected to make it down, nothing recognisable as a telescope. The risk of a re-entry accident grows over the longer term, which is why designing satellites to come down safely matters more and more, he added. Nasa’s prized Swift satellite was primarily designed to study gamma-ray bursts using its multi-wavelength array of three telescopes.
Since its launch in 2004, Swift had also studied hundreds of supernova explosions, star-shredding black holes, stellar X-ray flares, asteroids and comets, contributing to some 7,000 published scientific papers. The observatory, which lacked its own propulsion system, had long outlasted its two-year design life and had been drifting towards orbital instability for months. The failure of the rescue mission in July marked the beginning of the end for the Swift satellite.
