NASA's mission to save Swift Observatory fails. Here's what went wrong

NASA is calling off an ambitious mission to save a prized space telescope from plummeting back to Earth and being destroyed in the atmosphere.

The Swift Observatory has been observing the cosmos for more than two-decades, but its rapidly declining orbit has put it in jeopardy of reentering Earth's atmosphere and burning up . NASA had sought to prevent the telescope's demise by mounting a rescue mission sending a commercial spacecraft to grab Swift and boost it back up to a higher orbit.

A successful operation would have extended the life of the Swift Observatory by several more years, saving the U.S. space agency money needed to launch a replacement. It also would have marked the first time that a commercial robotic spacecraft captured a government satellite that – unlike other spacecraft like the Hubble Space Telescope – was never meant to be serviced in space .