The Window Is Eleven Hours
A drawing of a falling satellite and an equatorial band. Not a NASA image, and not a prediction of where a piece will land.
NASA posted on 2 November 2026 that the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday, 4 November, almost 22 years after launch. As of Monday, the U.S. Space Force predicted the roughly 3,200-pound spacecraft would come in at about 3:30 a.m. EST on that Wednesday, with an uncertainty of 11 hours. I am writing this on Tuesday in Chicago. The clock in that sentence is already a day old, and NASA said they and Space Force would keep updating it.
A two-year job that stayed
Swift launched in 2004 to watch gamma-ray bursts. The prime mission was two years. It carried three telescopes and could swing toward a short outburst, then send an alert so other observatories could look. NASA’s 2 November note lists what that turned into: active galaxies, X-ray flares on stars, supernovae, and comets and asteroids in this solar system. I did not open the science archive. The count of bursts is not in that note.
The boost never happened
The 23 October post is the one that ends the work. Drag is normal in low Earth orbit. Recent solar activity made Swift sink faster. A high-risk, fast-turnaround servicing mission ended in August without an attempt to raise the orbit. Science had been paused to keep drag down while that boost was still the plan. After the restart, Swift looked at hundreds of targets, from stellar-explosion leftovers to distant black holes and to comets here. Pointing again added drag, and the sink sped up.
On 20 October it was at 171 miles, which NASA also writes as 275 kilometers. It could not compensate, and it went into safe mode. The operations team at Penn State in University Park sent the command that ended the mission, so the spacecraft would be ready to come down.
Most of it burns. The band is the map.
NASA expects most of the spacecraft to burn up. Some components are expected to survive. Where those pieces are depends on the minute it enters, and that place can switch hemispheres. The orbit is the limit. Swift’s inclination is low, so surviving fragments are limited to the belt between 20.6 degrees south and 20.6 degrees north. The chance of harm to anyone on Earth is given as approximately 1 in 2,100. “Unlikely” is their word. It is not zero, and it is not a street address.
Eleven hours around 3:30 a.m. EST on 4 November is a prediction as of Monday, printed on 2 November. It is not a landing time. Other trackers were already printing different centers. I am not averaging them.
Sources: NASA Science, 2 November 2026; NASA Science, 23 October 2026. The toy only draws the printed latitude band and an 11-hour slide. It does not know the orbit.