NASA said Monday that the U.S. Space Force predicts the roughly 3,200-pound Swift Observatory will reenter the atmosphere at approximately 3:30 a.m. EST on Nov.

4, with an uncertainty window of 11 hours. Most of the 1.5-ton telescope is expected to burn up, but NASA's mission chief scientist Brad Cenko says a handful of denser-than-lead tungsten pieces and some mirror parts could survive.

Any surviving wreckage will most likely plunge into the ocean, and the agency says it and the Space Force will keep updating predictions as the descent steepens.

Swift launched on Nov. 20, 2004 to catch gamma-ray bursts and supernovas, and it spent two decades swiveling rapidly toward the universe's most violent explosions.

Intense solar activity in recent years dragged it down faster than expected, prompting NASA to hire Katalyst Space for a first-of-its-kind commercial rescue.

Once the rescue was called off, Swift resumed observations until late October, when it grew too low to remain steady and its systems were shut down.

The Swift team is mourning an observatory that became NASA's first responder for cosmic eruptions: its final tally includes more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and 1,400 exploding stars, plus comets, asteroids and star-shredding black holes, CBS News reports.

NASA Astrophysics Division director Shawn Domagal-Goldman has said nothing pinpoints gamma-ray bursts like Swift, whose alerts Hubble and Webb followed with deeper investigations.

"At least in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down. And that end is catastrophic," Penn State astronomer John Nousek, who led the control team, told CBS News. Scientists are still working out how to fill the gap Swift leaves.

Swift's orbit passes over a band within roughly 21 degrees of the equator, mostly ocean, but swaths of Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America sit inside the reentry zone.

NASA, quoted by CBS News, put the risk of harm to anyone on Earth at roughly 1 in 2,100, while NewsNation reports NASA's own casualty estimate as no more than 1 in 10,000. Aerospace Corp. predicts reentry on Wednesday, Nov.

4, per USA Today. Officials warn that anyone who finds debris should not touch it and should report it to NASA; no one has ever been killed by falling space debris in nearly 70 years of spaceflight.