NASA telescope is plunging back to Earth after 22 years in orbit

November 2, 2026 / 2:00 PM EST / CBS/AP Add CBS News on Google An aging NASA telescope is barely clinging to space after a failed rescue effort left it tottering lower and lower. The space agency said Monday it predicts the Swift Observatory will likely come crashing down on Wednesday. Most of the 1 ½-ton telescope is expected to burn up in the atmosphere. But a handful of pieces made of denser-than-lead tungsten and some mirror parts could survive reentry, according to NASA's Brad Cenko, the mission's chief scientist."As of Monday, the U.S. Space Force predicted that the roughly 3,200-pound spacecraft will re-enter the atmosphere at approximately 3:30 a.m. EST, Nov. 4, with an uncertainty of 11 hours," NASA said on Monday. Any surviving wreckage will most likely plunge into the ocean. But swaths of Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America are within the reentry zone. The U.S. Space Force is tracking the telescope's dwindling path.In a statement on Monday, NASA said the "risk of harm coming to anyone on Earth is unlikely" — roughly 1 in 2,100. "NASA and Space Force will continue to monitor the re-entry and update predictions," the agency said. Swift Observatory NASA Its cosmic cremation has the Swift team mourning, yet full of gratitude, for the observations the telescope made during its 22 years in orbit. Swift blasted off on Nov. 20, 2004, to search for some of the biggest explosions in the universe: gamma-ray bursts and supernovas. "We've known this day would come since before Swift was launched. At least in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down. And that end is catastrophic," said Pennsylvania State University's John Nousek, an astronomer who led the control team. Intense solar activity over the past few years dragged Swift down faster than usual. NASA hired Katalyst Space a year ago to mount a rush rescue. But the company's three-armed robot named Link ran into trouble after launching in July and got no closer than 7 miles to 9 miles to the telescope. Link plunged back to Earth in September. Swift resumed observations once the rescue attempt was called off, discovering even more gamma-ray bursts and other ultrahigh-energy events. But by late October, the telescope was too low to remain steady for observations, and its systems were shut down. Its final tally: more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and 1,400 exploding stars, not to mention a slew of comets, asteroids and star-shredding black holes. The telescope's superpower was its ability to swivel swiftly — thus its name — toward erupting celestial events. Shawn Domagal-Goldman, Astrophysics Division director at NASA, told "CBS Mornings" in June that nothing pinpoints gamma-ray bursts like the Swift Observatory."A nuclear weapon going off doesn't even compare to the magnitude of energy that comes out of these things and it's literally the biggest explosions in the universe," Domagal-Goldman said. NASA considered Swift a first responder for the Hubble and Webb space telescopes and others that would follow its alerts and provide deeper investigations. Scientists are still figuring out how to fill the gap. "Our fervent hope is that the lessons learned by the successes of Swift can be applied to new generations of space missions to accelerate our discoveries about the universe," Nousek said in an email. In: NASA NASA embarks on daring mission to save doomed telescope from falling to Earth 03:37 NASA embarks on daring mission to save doomed telescope from falling to Earth (03:37)