Doomed spacecraft shares cosmic images before fiery re-entry

By Dean Murray

A doomed spacecraft set to plunge to Earth in weeks has shared new cosmic images.

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched in 2004 to detect and monitor gamma-ray bursts, but after 21 years of science operations, its low-Earth orbit began to rapidly decay because of increased solar activity.

A daring mission to catch and lift NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to a higher orbit failed over the summer.

Currently located around 200 miles above Earth, NASA says Swift is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere later this year, potentially around November.

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The 1,470 kg, 5.6 m-high observatory will most likely break up and largely burn up, but NASA has not publicly confirmed whether debris will reach Earth.

NASA said on Thursday, Oct. 9, that the new image collection is just a sample of the many cosmic objects that Swift and the Chandra X-ray Observatory have observed together in the pursuit of learning more about the mysteries of space.

They include the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), one of the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbors at a distance of about 200,000 light-years from Earth, as well as NGC 1097, a spiral galaxy about 48 million light-years from Earth that contains a supermassive black hole about 140 million times more massive than our Sun.

The rescue mission, using Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft, ultimately failed to raise Swift's orbit after an ongoing attitude-control issue left the vehicle unable to capture the observatory.