Science
fromwww.scientificamerican.com
3 weeks agoInside NASA's audacious plan to save a doomed space telescope
NASA's Swift Observatory faces orbital decline but aims to extend its mission with a robotic intervention to boost its altitude.
GRBs are extremely energetic explosions that rank among the most powerful astrophysical events in the universe, so luminous they can be seen from billions of light-years away. They're most commonly caused by either a merging pair of neutron stars or a very massive star ending its life in a supernova called a collapsar; in both of these classical cases, the resulting stellar cataclysm can spit out a giant, tightly focused jet of radiation and particles.