NASA's Swift space telescope plunges back to Earth in fiery demise

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A premier NASA space telescope met a fiery end as it crashed back to Earth — two decades after its launch — following the failure of a rescue mission. The unmanned Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory re-entered the Earth's atmosphere over the North Sumatra region of Indonesia on Wednesday at 7.39 am EST (12.39 pm UTC), the US space agency said. Most of the spacecraft was expected to have burnt up as it traveled through the atmosphere, NASA said, adding that some components may have survived re-entry. NASA's prized Swift observatory — equipped with three telescopes — was launched into orbit in 2004. The observatory was tasked with studying gamma ray bursts, the biggest ​energy blasts in universe for two years.