According to NASA's latest estimates, shared yesterday (Nov. 2), the roughly 3,200-pound (1,450 kilograms) spacecraft will likely reenter Earth's atmosphere around 3:30 a.m. EST Wednesday (Nov. 4), with an uncertainty of plus or minus 11 hours — meaning the defunct observatory could plunge down as early as this evening.
As with all spacecraft reentries, the risk to humans is minimal. Most of the Swift telescope is expected to burn up in the atmosphere, according to NASA. Any surviving fragments will likely fall somewhere between 20.6 degrees south latitude and 20.6 degrees north latitude — a range that includes parts of Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America, the Arabian Peninsula, India, Africa and Oceania, but also a lot of ocean.
NASA will continue to update their predictions as the reentry window draws closer.
What is the Swift spacecraft?
Swift has detected thousands of deep-space explosions, including sudden flares from neutron stars (illustrated here). (Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)related stories
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Engineers on the Swift team officially shut down the observatory's science operations on Oct. 20, after the spacecraft fell too low in orbit to continue taking steady observations of the sky.
As Swift goes out with a fiery bang, it leaves behind a trove of scientific data, including contributions to more than 7,000 scientific papers so far, according to NASA. This number will only increase as Swift's final observations are processed.
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