NASA's Swift space telescope re-enters over Indonesia after 22 years and a failed rescue

NASA's Swift Observatory, a roughly 3,200-pound (1,452-kg) space telescope, re-entered Earth's atmosphere at 7:39 a.m. ET on Wednesday over the North Sumatra region of Indonesia, the U.S. Space Force confirmed. NASA said most of the spacecraft was expected to burn up, though some denser components may have survived. Launched on Nov. 20, 2004, for a planned two-year mission to study gamma-ray bursts and other cosmic explosions, Swift operated for about 22 years until increased solar activity caused its low-Earth orbit to decay. A rescue effort failed less than three months earlier: Katalyst Space, hired by NASA in July, sent a three-armed robot named Link to push the telescope higher, but the craft ran into trouble. NASA had put the risk of harm to anyone at about 1 in 2,100 and said fragments could land in an equatorial belt covering parts of Latin America, Africa, southern Asia and northern Australia, outside the U.S. and Europe.

The right-leaning Daily Mail headlines an "uncontrolled fiery crash" and calls the telescope "doomed." It gives the precise coordinates, the debris belt and a quote from Penn State astronomer John Nousek that the end was always coming. Just the News is shorter and relies on the Associated Press. It stresses that the mission lasted over ten times longer than planned and that the descent was faster than expected, and it says the rescue craft crashed in September. CBS News, on the left, uses a more neutral headline and adds the 1-in-2,100 risk figure, the 11-hour prediction window and Space Force tracking, with more detail on the Katalyst rescue attempt. All sides agree on the time, place and cause. Alternative outlets AP and the South China Morning Post largely match, adding that the satellite re-entered at about 22 times the speed of sound.