NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, an aging space telescope that has watched the cosmos for 22 years, is expected to plunge into Earth's atmosphere around November 2026 and burn up — after a $30 million commercial rescue mission failed to save it.
Swift launched on November 20, 2004, at a cost of about $364 million, built to detect gamma-ray bursts. It became astronomy's "first responder": whenever it caught a cosmic explosion, it instantly alerted other telescopes worldwide.
Over 22 years it tallied water from the interstellar comet Borisov, observed flares from black holes, and detected countless gamma-ray bursts.
Swift flies in low-Earth orbit, and the current bout of solar activity has expanded the upper atmosphere, increasing drag far beyond what engineers anticipated. The observatory now sits only about 200 miles (320 km) above Earth.
NASA suspended science observations earlier this year and repositioned the spacecraft to minimize drag. The 1,470 kg, 5.6-meter-tall telescope is expected to break up and largely burn up; NASA has not publicly confirmed whether any debris will reach the ground.
In September 2024 NASA contracted Katalyst Space Technologies of Flagstaff, Arizona, for $30 million to build LINK — a three-armed robotic servicing craft, described as America's first commercial space robot — to capture Swift and boost it to a higher orbit.
LINK launched July 3, 2026, but electronics failures disabled two of the three reaction wheels it needed for orientation, and a bad valve sent it into a fast spin that disrupted communications. By the time controllers regained command, fuel was too low and the rescue was called off in August. LINK itself burned up on September 25, 2026, after 85 days in orbit — though it did approach within 7 to 9 miles of Swift and image it.
NASA's Shawn Domagal-Goldman said the attempt was "worthwhile either way" as practice for future satellite-rescue missions.
This week NASA released a collection of objects Swift observed jointly with the Chandra X-ray Observatory, including the Small Magellanic Cloud (~200,000 light-years away, one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors), spiral galaxy NGC 1097 (~48 million light-years away, with a supermassive black hole about 140 million times the Sun's mass), and spiral galaxy NGC 4151, whose central black hole is still growing.
NASA said the collection is only a sample — and likely among the last images Swift ever sends home.