A 3,200-pound NASA spacecraft could fall to Earth tonight
NASA's Swift Observatory is about to make a fiery reentry through Earth's atmosphere after a private mission to save it failed. Most of the spacecraft will burn up in orbit.
NASA's three-and-a-half-ton Swift spacecraft, a decades-old observatory launched in 2004, faces imminent reentry into Earth's atmosphere, possibly as early as tonight, November 3. The roughly 1,450-kilogram telescope, tasked with detecting powerful space explosions, is rapidly losing altitude due to increased drag from solar activity.
Independent analyses from the Aerospace Corporation estimate reentry between 5:12 a.m. or 8 hours earlier, EST on Wednesday, November 4. While the odds of any surviving fragments hitting a populated area remain low, with only a 1 in 2,100 chance, the spacecraft's fiery descent could leave behind a scientific legacy of over 7,000 scientific papers.
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