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Oct 22, 2026

The NASA Swift observatory is rapidly losing altitude, now below 280 km.

It won't be long before it enters the atmosphere and burns up.

The first graph from NASA from May 2026 shows predicted altitudes for Swift under various scenarios. Swift has been following the plot farthest to the right because of various steps taken by the Swift team to reduce drag.

The plot at the bottom shows actual altitude over the past few months.

https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/2026/05/26/nasa-predicts-swift-spacecrafts-location-for-boost-mission/
https://www.satcat.com/sats/28485
27/n

1. This graph shows actual and predicted altitudes for NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The thick orange line shows Swift’s mean altitude from November 2025 to early May 2026. The curves in various shades of green show altitude forecasts generated by the Space Science Mission Operations team at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The January 2026 forecast (leftmost curve) shows that, by summer, Swift was likely to reach a critical height of 185 miles (300 kilometers)

NASA ScienceNASA Predicts Swift Spacecraft’s Location for Boost Mission - NASA ScienceNASA analysts and engineers have been closely tracking the agency’s sinking Neil Gehrel’s Swift Observatory as part of a fast-paced plan to raise it to a higher orbit.

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Oct 22, 2026 · 17:46 UTC

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AkaSci 🛰️@[email protected]

18h

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NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory ended its science mission on October 20, as the spacecraft is orbiting at less than 275 km altitude. The greater atmospheric drag at this height affects the telescope's pointing stability.

"The Swift archive contains nearly 22 years of brightness measurements of all kinds of cosmic outbursts, multiwavelength spectra, more than 1.5 million images from its Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope, and much more."

You did well.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/swift/nasas-swift-mission-ends/
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NASA ScienceNASA’s Swift Mission Ends, Leaves Behind Scientific Bonanza - NASA ScienceNASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has ended its science mission now that the spacecraft is orbiting less than 171 miles (275 kilometers) above Earth’s

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