Goodbye, Swift! A Giant Space Explosion Hunter Retires

Meet the Swift Observatory, a legendary NASA telescope launched to track down the fiercest fireworks in the cosmos! In deep space, dying stars and colliding black holes unleash mega-blasts called gamma-ray bursts. These flashes shine with mind-boggling power, but they disappear in just a few blinks of an eye.

That is why Swift was given its name: it was built to move super swiftly. Whenever its detectors spotted an invisible flash of high-energy gamma rays, the robotic satellite spun on a dime to aim its cameras right at the blast. It alerted telescopes on Earth in under a minute so scientists could watch the cosmic spectacle together.