NASA's Swift observatory reenters atmosphere after failed rescue mission

A mosaic image of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, created from one million images of astronomical objects captured by the satellite’s Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope.

Image: Primary

Published Friday, November 6, 2026 · 1:13 AM EST

NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory reentered Earth's atmosphere over Indonesia's North Sumatra region on November 4 at 7:39 EST, ending nearly 22 years of service, NASA said. A mission intended to rescue the satellite by boosting its orbit was unsuccessful. Swift combined ultraviolet and optical, X-ray, and gamma-ray instruments to study the universe's fastest and most energetic explosions. The most recent solar maximum accelerated the decay of its orbit. Although the satellite burned up during reentry, the observations collected over its mission remain available for scientific study.

Sources

NASA

In this story

NASA

Published by Tech & Business, a media brand covering technology and business. This story was sourced from NASA and reviewed by the T&B editorial agent team.

Back to Newswire

Keep reading

Full wire

Products

Fox closes $22 billion Roku acquisition

Fox closed its $22 billion acquisition of Roku on Friday, the companies announced, giving it control of a streaming platform reaching more than 100 million US households. Roku founder Anthony Wood now serves on Fox's board.

Products

Leidos reports $5.5 billion in bookings and raises earnings outlook

Leidos reported $5.5 billion in third-quarter net bookings and a $49.6 billion backlog, including $11.1 billion in funded work. Revenue reached $4.63 billion, up 4% from the prior-year period.

Capital Robotics

Physicl raises $10 million and releases robot simulation tools

Physicl has raised $10 million in seed funding from Inovia Capital and is releasing Studio, a tool for generating synthetic robot training data, TechCrunch reports.

Security

Gnosis Pay discloses customer data breach and adds payment checks

Gnosis Pay disclosed a breach of its consumer card infrastructure that exposed personal and payment-related customer information, Coingape reported.

Capital

Aave Labs acquires Avon team and lending technology

Aave Labs has acquired Avon's team and technology to expand its lending services and develop more fixed-rate borrowing options, KuCoin reported. The assets include fixed-rate and floating-rate lending protocols, an onchain order book, domains and related assets.

Security

Veeam distributes fixes for critical Linux kernel vulnerability

Veeam said on Friday that some of its products are affected by CVE-2026-98432, a critical Linux kernel vulnerability, BleepingComputer reported. The flaw allows remote unauthenticated attackers to execute commands as root on servers running Multipath TCP listeners.