I am very sorry to report that the reboost mission to put the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory into a higher orbit has failed. The fate of Swift is now pretty much sealed: it will burn up in our atmosphere during re-entry sometime later this year.

Swift launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts (or GRBs), which are unbelievably powerful — they outshine entire galaxies, by a lot — but very brief flashes of high-energy radiation that appear all over the sky, usually a few per week. And by brief I mean some last only milliseconds, while others for a few minutes. They come from the births of black holes, when massive stars explode as supernovae and their cores collapse. Swift was designed to sweep large areas of the sky looking for them, then quickly turn to hone in on them — it’s named after the bird which hunts insects and can turn uncannily rapidly to catch them. 

As of this writing, Swift has detected over 2,000 GRBs. Two thousand. That’s amazing.

It was initially placed in an orbit about 600 kilometers above Earth. The atmosphere there is extremely thin, but over the decades caused enough drag to steal energy from Swift and drop it to its current altitude of under 400 km. Worse, the sun has been active the past few years, which puffs up Earth’s atmosphere, making it thicker than usual higher up. That has accelerated Swift’s fall.

NASA funded a mission by the private company Katalyst Space to very quickly build and launch a spacecraft called LINK to meet up with Swift, dock with it, and slowly boost it up to a higher orbit, saving the venerable mission. That launched in July, but immediately started having problems with attitude control, meaning they couldn’t orient it properly. That in turn means it can’t rendezvous with Swift. After weeks of trying, they have decided to terminate the attempt. It’s not possible to know exactly when Swift will de-orbit and burn up, but it won’t be more than a few months. 

I’m sad about the mission ending, of course, and the science we’ll lose. But I’m more upset for the people involved, which is a huge number. I worked on Swift for a few years doing education and public outreach — writing articles for the website, creating student activities using Swift science, even writing copy for posters and models and more. I got to learn a lot about GRBs, and meet some of the terrific folks behind the science of the mission.

That includes Neil Gehrels, the father of Swift; it was his idea to build the spacecraft in the first place. He was the Principal Investigator on Swift, and also a really nice guy with a great sense of humor. When I wrote the chapter on GRBs in my book Death from the Skies! I talked with him about some of the science, and he even agreed to give it a once-over to check the technical details. I remember specifically reading quite a few papers on the topic, but still not understanding exactly what happens at the very moment a GRB forms, so I asked him about it and he very nonchalantly said, “That’s OK; no one knows exactly what happens”. I felt a lot better.

But all good things…Swift revolutionized our understanding of these colossal events, and astronomy owes a huge debt to the mission. Other observatories, like the Fermi gamma-ray observatory, will continue the search, and science will march on. But Swift will always be special to me and scores of other astronomers. My condolences to everyone on the team, and also my congratulations on one of the most spectacularly successful NASA missions of all time.

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