[Music]
Stefan Immler: For hundreds of years, thousands of years,
humans have thought the universe is a very static place.
If you go out a night and look into the night sky you will see that things don't really
change much. The universe appeared very static for a long time.
We now know this is not true. The universe is a highly dynamic
place and things are happening all the time. Every single second
a star explodes in a gigantic supernova explosion
somewhere in the universe. And we have to go and find it. We have to build instruments that
are capable of finding those unforeseen events.
John Nousek: Way back in 1998 we were at a scientific
meeting in Boulder, Colorado. And I was invited to a
you know, invitation only meeting.
And at that meeting six of us got together and we came up with the idea creating
Swift. It was a group of people from Goddard and from Penn State.
Alan Wells: Swift set out to combine
gamma-ray instruments that could roughly
find out where gamma rays may be coming from, but only
with a very crude estimate, and then
through the design of this remarkable spacecraft,
to spin that spacecraft rapidly across the sky, and
point an X-ray telescope and an optical/ultraviolet
telescope at the possible location of the gamma-ray burst.
Neil Gehrels: Whenever a gamma-ray burst goes off, which happens about
twice a week, the satellite detects the gamma-ray burst and it
sends a message down to the ground, and it goes out on a network to our
cellphones and we're paged. Stefan: What I loved being a member of Swift team
is carrying a Blackberry on the side of my hip that became
almost like a part of my body. And every time
Swift discovered something unforeseen, or a gamma-ray burst went off,
the Blackberry would start vibrating and I would run to the nearest computer as fast as I could.
And this is something I miss now, not
working anymore for Swift, this excitement. That things can happen at any time,
and you don't know what it is. Neil: I have on two
occasions gotten a gamma-ray burst alert while I was giving a lecture
about Swift. And so I told the audience
that 'here's the new gamma-ray burst coming in' and we actually one time
got it on the screen and watched the data as they were coming in
in front of the audience. Caryl Gronwall: I was woken up by
GRB 090423. It was 4 in the morning, it was really
annoying, it was five years into the mission so GRBs were not so new
and exciting then. And I was like 'oh yeah, yet another GRB' dealt
with it, went back to sleep, woke up the next morning and there was
information from ground-based telescopes that had observed this gamma-ray burst
in the infrared that were implying that it was a very distant gamma-ray burst
at redshift greater than 8, that was very exciting. And the next
night, telescopes in Hawaii
were able to confirm that redshift, that it's at a redshift of z of 8.2,
that means that gamma-ray burst went off more than
13 billion years ago, it's 13 billion light-years away, we're seeing light
that, from a star that was only 700 million years after
the Big Bang. That's one of the most distant objects that's ever
been detected, that was very cool. Jamie Kennea: In my case I had a
different experience where it was Thanksgiving, and
my family and I had spent a large amount of time working to prepare the
Thanksgiving dinner, we had friends 'round, and everything was ready, the food was on the table,
and right as I put my fork into my turkey, the
my phone went off, something had exploded in the universe, Swift had detected
it, and we had to go to work. So, it doesn't always
happen at convenient times, but it is still exciting.
John: Basically, I'm on call 24 hours a day, so it's hard to
decide where my personal life starts and my Swift professional life ends.
Judith Racusin: As the astronomy and
astrophysics community has engaged with Swift, the scientists
have learned new ways to use the observatory, and its
ability to rapidly follow-up new sources has been
seen as a really incredibly useful tool. And so Swift has
evolved from spending most of its time observing gamma-ray bursts and following them
for sometimes weeks or months afterwords, to doing more
science that's proposed by the community to study other types of objects. Neil: We look at
supernovae, novae, black hole transients,
comets, flaring stars, all different
kinds of objects. John: Basically every year, Swift makes a new
discovery that changes some field of astrophysics. We have made many, many
discoveries in other areas. We've discovered something called a tidal disruption event.
That's when a star is falling into a black hole and gets ripped to shreds and
we see the light from that collapse onto the black hole. That's very, very exciting.
We've made important discoveries about comets: how much water and how much
other material there is in comets that people didn't know before. We have
actually seen a supernova--a star that blows up--at the moment
when the light broke out from the surface of the exploding star.
Every year for the ten years of Swift we've had one of these really
important discoveries. Chryssa Kouveliotou: It is the Cadillac of
satellites. It does everything in the transient field.
In one package, and mind you,
this is a small package, it's an explorer mission, we have
a huge amount of capability. Jamie: Swift's ability
to observe many objects in one day I think is what makes it special, as well as its
ability to respond very quickly to new events in the universe.
No other mission is as agile as we are. Gianpiero Tagliaferri: Swift performs
every day five to seven targets of opportunity, so
sources are requested by the astronomers to be observed, and they are
observed every day. And this is a very powerful capability that the
community now is taking advantage of.
Brad Cenko: I new the instrument, I new its capabilities, but I've been extremely
impressed with the team of people that behind the scenes make the
mission work. There is a group of duty scientists,
mission planners, the flight operations team,
that make sure that we can continue to observe
as many targets as we do, that we can continue to do
the rapid response that is really unique to the observatory.
And without such a dedicated crew of people behind the scenes,
I don't think Swift would be nearly as successful as it has been.
Patrizia Caraveo: Swift mission has been extremely
successful in the past, up to now, and
it will no doubt continue to be successful
in the future. And I am sure
that a lot of serendipitous science is just
waiting for us. Chryssa: The universe has
a lot of secrets that have not yet been revealed yet. We do
believe that Swift can and will reveal
many more mysteries and puzzles in the universe.
Stefan: We don't know what will happen over the next ten years, hoping that Swift
will still give us exciting data. But what we do know
is that Swift will give us exciting new data. Because of
its pure nature, this is what it was built for: to study
new, unforeseen, unexpected events. And they will inevitably happen.
Neil: It's been a part of my life--every day--
for the last 20 years. I love it. It's produced so
much great science and, you know, it's been very fulfilling.
But every day I think about this
delicate instrumentation in the harsh environment
orbiting the Earth, and how it's able to keep going
all of those years. And I very often will just look up at the sky and think about
Swift. It's true.
[Music]
[Beeping]