NASA has announced that the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, one of the agency’s space telescopes, is expected to fall back to Earth within hours. Engineers tracking the spacecraft’s declining orbit say its reentry into the atmosphere is now imminent, though pinpointing exactly when and where any surviving fragments might land remains difficult.
According to the agency’s latest risk assessment, there is roughly a one-in-2,100 chance that debris from the telescope could strike and injure a person on the ground. While that may sound alarming, space agencies routinely calculate such odds whenever a defunct satellite or spacecraft is set to reenter, since most objects breaking apart during reentry burn up long before reaching the surface. Still, larger structures sometimes leave fragments intact enough to reach the ground, which is why NASA continues to monitor the telescope’s descent closely.
The Swift Observatory has spent years in orbit conducting astronomical observations before being decommissioned, and like many retired satellites, it was left to gradually lose altitude until gravity pulled it back toward Earth. Uncontrolled reentries like this one are not unusual, and the vast majority of our planet’s surface—covered mostly by oceans and sparsely populated land—means the actual risk to any individual remains extremely low.
For the full report and the latest updates from NASA, read the original article in The New York Times.
Source: A NASA Telescope Is Predicted to Crash Back to Earth Within Hours (rss.nytimes.com).
Image: europeanspaceagency, BY-SA 2.0 (via Openverse).