A Swift recovery: Why NASA’s Swift X-ray observatory is getting an orbital boost

A Swift recovery: Why NASA’s Swift X-ray observatory is getting an orbital boost

Figure 1: The Swift observatory (Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center). NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, or Swift for short, had a life-saving orbital boost mission set into motion on July 3rd, 2026. After nearly twenty-two years of scientific operations studying the X-ray sky, the satellite observatory was projected to fall back to Earth due to natural orbital decay by the end of 2026.  An unprecedented decision was made, however, t…