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Satellite names aren’t always easy to understand, but NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory states its key ability up front. Launched on November 20, 2004, Swift is first and foremost a rapid-response gamma-ray burst explorer.
Gamma-ray bursts, or GRBs, are the most powerful explosions in the universe. They arise when massive stars run out of fuel and collapse, or when pairs of orbiting neutron stars collide. GRBs can be as brief as a few milliseconds, are very rare, and happen in distant galaxies, which makes them hard to spot. Despite this, Swift has managed to observe 1,800 GRBs.
Scientists and engineers designed Swift’s GRB detector to see large portions of the sky and quickly relay a GRB’s location to the ground so other missions can follow up . They also enabled Swift to change where it’s looking very rapidly so it could target its X-ray and ultraviolet/optical telescopes on any detected event.
Swift owes much of its existence to Neil Gehrels, who was a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Neil was a global figure in gamma-ray astronomy and gamma-ray bursts in particular. He was part of the small group that first imagined Swift in 1998 and was instrumental in seeing it through to launch and into its early mission. After Neil passed away in 2017, Swift was renamed in his honor.
Over its 20 years of operation, Swift has proven incredibly useful and versatile. Its rapid detection, alerts, and repointing have allowed missions like NASA’s Chandra, Webb and Hubble to quickly follow up on transient events.
Beyond GRB detections, Swift’s X-ray and ultraviolet/optical telescopes have enabled it to perform science that no one imagined for it prior to launch. Swift has tracked near-Earth asteroids, observed more distant asteroid collisions, studied comets, seen massive flares on distant stars, taken ultraviolet surveys of nearby galaxies, and made countless observations of short-lived cosmic phenomena.
Despite the failure of one of the spinning reaction wheels that enable Swift’s rapid turning, the spacecraft remains as nimble as it was in its first year, and it promises to remain a critical first responder in NASA’s astrophysics fleet.
[NASA]