Overview
- NASA confirmed late Tuesday that the Neil Gehrels Swift telescope lost attitude control after more than two decades of operation and is now on an uncontrolled reentry trajectory toward Earth.
- Officials currently predict reentry within a roughly 12-hour window between early Tuesday and Wednesday with modelled ground-track uncertainty of up to about 480 kilometers.
- The agency and the U.S. Space Force say the overall risk to people is low, roughly 1 in 2,100, because most of the 1,500 kg spacecraft is expected to burn up during atmospheric entry.
- A NASA-funded rescue mission run by Katalyst Space Technologies, paid about $30 million, failed months ago after an attitude/orientation fault that engineers have linked to intense solar activity and that craft also reentered uncontrolled.
- Experts and models say surviving fragments are most likely to fall in the equatorial ocean band that crosses parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and agencies will update predicted impact zones as tracking improves.