Swift team mourning yet full of gratitude for the observations the telescope made during its 22 years in orbit. Swift blasted off on Nov. 20, 2004, to search for some of the biggest explosions in the universe: gamma ray bursts and supernovas.

NASA’s article is more informative: 2-year primary mission.

“Swift was designed as a satellite dedicated to studying gamma-ray bursts, outbursts that came and went so quickly that no one could target them with large telescopes to learn more,” said S. Bradley Cenko, the mission’s principal investigator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Swift needed to detect and locate gamma-ray bursts, communicate their position to other observatories, and then swing its telescopes around to image the burst locations before their afterglows faded out. This typically took Swift about a minute to do.”

Oh shit, this actually really sucks. There aren’t many gamma telescopes, as they need to be based in space.

That’s crazy! Why did it take until its eulogy to finally see what made it unique?

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