NASA's 22-year-old Swift satellite telescope falls from orbit in fiery finale

The US Space Force confirmed ​that Swift's re-entry occurred at 7:39 a.m. EST (1239 GMT), as the satellite streaked into the upper atmosphere at ​about 22 times the speed of sound over Indonesia's North Sumatra province, roughly 200 miles (322 km) ⁠north of the equator,.

NASA said it expected the frictional heat of re-entry would incinerate most of ​the satellite well above Earth's surface, with some fragments surviving the plunge, though the US space agency reported no damage or ​injuries on the ground from falling debris.

It was not immediately clear how close the telescope's re-entry point was to North Sumatra's capital and largest city, Medan, home to about 2.5 million people. The population of the province as a whole totals around 16 million.

The Space Force ​had earlier calculated the risk posed to populated areas as very low, putting the odds of harm coming to anyone ​on Earth at one chance in 2,100.

Dean Sladen, an aerospace engineer for Britain-based industrial parts supplier Accu Components, said prior to re-entry that ‌only ⁠a "handful of small, scorched fragments are expected to make it down, nothing recognizable as a telescope.

""Satellites this size re-enter the atmosphere regularly, and in nearly 70 years of spaceflight no one has ever been killed by falling debris," Sladen said in an email. The risk of a re-entry accident grows over the longer term, "which is why designing satellites to come down safely matters ​more and more," he added.

NASA's ​prized $500 million Swift satellite ⁠was primarily designed to study gamma-ray bursts - the most intense blasts of energy in the universe - using its multi-wavelength array of three telescopes. Since its launch in 2004, Swift had also studied ​hundreds of supernova explosions, star-shredding black holes, stellar X-ray flares, asteroids and comets, contributing to ​some 7,000 ⁠published scientific papers.

It ceased operations on October 20. The observatory, which lacked its own propulsion system, had long outlasted its two-year design life and had been drifting toward orbital instability for months.

In July, NASA and Arizona-based startup Katalyst launched a specially built rescue ⁠vehicle called ​LINK on a mission to rendezvous with Swift, latch onto the satellite ​and tug it into a higher, more sustainable orbit.

But the LINK spacecraft itself began spinning uncontrollably soon after reaching space, and by mid-August, mission managers ​abandoned the effort, resigned to letting Swift fall back to Earth.