Intense solar activity over recent years caused the orbit to decay, which brought re-entry sooner than expected. The solar maximum of 2024 and 2025 expanded the upper atmosphere and increased drag on a satellite that began at about 600 km (373 miles). By October 20, Swift had sunk to 275 km, too low to keep its telescopes steady on targets. Engineers formally ended science operations that day, and NASA announced the end of the mission on October 23.

NASA confirmed on November 2 that re-entry was imminent. Its own estimate put the event at about 3:30 a.m. EST on Wednesday, give or take 11 hours. An independent analysis by the Aerospace Corporation gave 5:12 a.m. EST with an eight-hour margin. NASA said most of the craft would burn up, and that any surviving pieces would land between 20.6° South and 20.6° North latitude. That band covers the Americas, Africa, India, the Arabian Peninsula, Oceania, the Caribbean, French Guiana and French Polynesia, and excludes metropolitan France. NASA put the chance of debris injuring someone at about 1 in 2,100, against 1 in 15,300 for a lightning strike.

Brad Cenko, NASA's chief scientist for the mission, said denser parts and mirrored portions might survive. Darren McKnight of the tracking firm LeoLabs said the satellite should break up enough to pose no danger, though its internal optical and X-ray telescopes might survive the heat.

A private rescue attempt did not work. Katalyst Space Technologies launched its three-armed LINK robotic vehicle from the Marshall Islands on July 3. Two of its three reaction wheels malfunctioned on July 28, sending it into an uncontrolled rotation. Katalyst canceled the operation on August 19, and LINK burned up in the atmosphere on September 25.

Swift launched in 2004 and operated for about 22 years, roughly 11 times its planned lifetime. Its signature strength was speed: it could turn 50 degrees in under 75 seconds, where the Hubble Space Telescope needs about 15 minutes to turn 90 degrees. That let it catch fast-changing high-energy events such as gamma-ray bursts, supernovae and X-ray flares. It had logged its 1,000th burst by 2015 and has since detected more than 2,000. In 2008 it observed the earliest X-ray phase of a supernova. In 2017 it helped localize high-energy neutrinos from a supermassive black hole, working with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, whose principal investigator, Francis Halzen, won the 2026 Nobel Prize in physics. In 2025 it detected hydroxyl on the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS. Its data fed about 7,000 scientific papers.

No dedicated replacement exists, though the Franco-Chinese SVOM observatory continues gamma-ray burst research. John Nousek, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, said: "At least in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down. And that end is catastrophic."

NASA is now asking industry whether it is interested in a mission to rescue Hubble, which launched in 1990 and is expected to re-enter by the mid-2030s. The agency is seeking commercial proposals to raise Hubble's orbit, upgrade its hardware or carry out a controlled deorbit. Nicky Fox, NASA's science mission chief, said there is more time to examine options for Hubble than there was for Swift. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said, "Hubble still has important science ahead of it," and that every reasonable opportunity to keep it operating should be explored. Any intervention would have to happen by 2032.