Before the event, NASA expected most of the spacecraft to burn up but said denser parts, including mirrored portions, could survive. It put any surviving fragments between 20.6 degrees south and 20.6 degrees north latitude, a band that crosses parts of the Americas, Africa, India, the Arabian Peninsula and Oceania. NASA's estimate of the chance that debris would hit a populated area was about 1 in 2,100. It compared that with the National Weather Service's odds of being struck by lightning, 1 in 15,300. Forecasts of the timing varied. NASA's estimate was about 3:30 a.m. EST on November 4, give or take 11 hours. An independent analysis by the Aerospace Corporation said 5:12 a.m., give or take eight hours.

Swift's orbit, at roughly 373 miles (600 kilometers) up, decayed after intense solar activity. The solar maximum of 2024 and 2025 and the geomagnetic storms from solar eruptions increased drag on the satellite. NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies tried to raise the orbit with a robotic servicing spacecraft called LINK, on a mission that launched on July 3. LINK had attitude-control problems, spun uncontrollably and fell back to Earth in September. Swift's science operations were shut down on October 20.

Swift launched in 2004 with a planned life of two years and ran for 22, about 11 times longer than planned. The telescope, about the size of a minibus, studied gamma-ray bursts, supernovae, black holes, black-hole eruptions and X-ray flares. Its defining feature was speed. It could rotate 50 degrees in under 75 seconds, while Hubble takes about 15 minutes to turn 90 degrees. Swift had detected its 1,000th gamma-ray burst by 2015. In 2008 it made the first observation of 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.

John Nousek, a Pennsylvania State University astronomer involved in the mission, said: "At least in low-Earth orbit, what goes up must come down. And that end is catastrophic."

NASA is now seeking industry interest in a possible rescue of the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990 and is expected to re-enter by the mid-2030s. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said every reasonable opportunity to keep Hubble operating should be explored, adding, "Hubble still has important science ahead of it." NASA's science mission chief, Nicky Fox, said there is more time to explore options for Hubble than there was for Swift, and that any rescue mission would need to happen by 2032.