After 22 years in orbit, NASA's Swift Observatory is barely clinging to space. The U.S. Space Force predicts the 1.5-ton gamma-ray telescope will come crashing down on or around Friday.

Intense solar activity over the past few years dragged Swift down faster than expected, and by late October it was too low to remain steady for observations, so mission controllers shut down its systems.

NASA says most of the spacecraft is expected to burn up in the atmosphere, though mission chief scientist Brad Cenko says a handful of pieces made of denser-than-lead tungsten and some mirror parts could survive reentry.

NASA hired Katalyst Space a year ago to mount a rush rescue, and the company's three-armed robot, named Link, launched in July. But Link ran into trouble and got no closer than 7 to 9 miles (12 to 15 kilometers) to the telescope before plunging back to Earth in September.

Once the rescue was called off, Swift resumed observations and even discovered more gamma-ray bursts and other ultrahigh-energy events before its orbit degraded too far to continue.

Swift blasted off on Nov. 20, 2004, to hunt some of the universe's biggest explosions: gamma-ray bursts and supernovas.

Its superpower was the ability to swivel swiftly — hence its name — toward erupting celestial events. NASA considered it a first responder for the Hubble and Webb space telescopes, which followed its alerts with deeper investigations.

Its final tally includes more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts and 1,400 exploding stars, plus comets, asteroids and star-shredding black holes.

According to Scripps News, as cited in the NewsCord aggregation, Swift delivered more than 1.5 million images and over 12 terabytes of data, feeding roughly 7,000 scientific papers.

NASA says any surviving wreckage will most likely plunge into the ocean, but swaths of Africa, Australia, India, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America are within the reentry zone.

The Space Force is tracking the telescope's dwindling path, and officials have not determined a precise landing location; the reported assessment points to a possible debris hazard rather than a confirmed impact area.

Penn State astronomer John Nousek, who led the control team, said, "We've known this day would come since before Swift was launched... that end is catastrophic."

Scientists are still figuring out how to fill the observational gap Swift leaves behind for gamma-ray astronomy.

Nousek said in an email, "Our fervent hope is that the lessons learned by the successes of Swift can be applied to new generations of space missions to accelerate our discoveries about the universe."

The Swift team is mourning the loss while remaining grateful for two decades of observations, and the failure of the Link rescue robot is likely to shape how agencies think about servicing aging spacecraft in low-Earth orbit.

In a brighter Halloween note for the niche, NASA's CHAPEA 2 Mars simulation officially ended October 31 after 378 days.

Four volunteers — Commander Ross Elder, Flight Engineer James Spicer, Medical Officer Ellen Ellis, and Science Officer Matthew Montgomery — stepped out of their 1,700-square-foot 3D-printed habitat at Johnson Space Center, having endured 22-minute communication delays, equipment failures, and a simulated two-week blackout.

According to Softonic, it is the second of three planned yearlong simulations, with applications open for the next analog campaign starting no earlier than August 2027.