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Today, a NASA space telescope streaked back to Earth like a meteor. As NPR's Geoff Brumfiel reports, it was a blazing end to a mission that captured some of the brightest events in the universe.
GEOFF BRUMFIEL, BYLINE: They're called gamma ray bursts, incredibly powerful flashes of high-energy light that last just a few seconds. And astronomers never know when or where in the night sky they're going to happen.
KIM PAGE: Keeping an eye on gamma ray bursts is a 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year job.
BRUMFIEL: Kim Page is an astrophysicist at the University of Leicester in the U.K. The job of keeping a constant eye out fell to a plucky little NASA satellite called Swift. Swift got its name for what it could do. Within seconds of detecting a burst, it could turn its telescopes to look at where it came from while simultaneously alerting scientists on the ground below by sending a text to their cellphones.
PAGE: I gather from my colleagues that I am unusually cheery for somebody who's been woken up at 3 o'clock in the morning.
BRUMFIEL: Page has last count of how many times Swift woke her up to look at something, but she says it never got old.
PAGE: It's still really thrilling to know that you're one of the first people to see the data as they come in.
BRUMFIEL: The data included images of some of the biggest explosions in the universe. Brad Cenko is the principal investigator of Swift. He says the amount of energy involved is wild. A gamma ray burst in just seconds...
BRAD CENKO: It's radiating more energy in that period than the sun will in its entire lifetime.
BRUMFIEL: These are unfathomably violent events like black holes shredding their neighbors and extremely dense dead stars colliding together. It's that last one, the collision of dead stars, that Swift played a key role in studying. Those collisions led to gargantuan explosions, which in turn forged many of the elements that eventually found their way to Earth.
CENKO: The precious metals in our jewelry - gold, platinum, silver. The iodine that's in our bodies plays a really important biological role.
BRUMFIEL: A lot of it came from ancient collisions like these. We know that now thanks to Swift. But it was a star much closer to home that undid Swift. The sun has become more volatile in recent years. Solar flares hit the Earth, causing the atmosphere to swell, and that in turn dragged Swift out of orbit. Astronomers like Kim Page will no longer receive those late-night calls alerting them to the universe's biggest mysteries.
PAGE: It does kind of feel like losing one of the family. I mean, I've thought about Swift every day for 22 years.
BRUMFIEL: But she will have memories and images of thousands of objects from across the cosmos. Geoff Brumfiel, NPR News.
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