BBC News: NASA's Swift Telescope Peering Deep In To Space
BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) science reporter, Jonathan Amos, reports on the progress of the Swift spacecraft which is a more or less a satellite telescope "set up to catch gamma-ray bursts - the intensely bright but fleeting flashes of very high-energy radiation that signal some of the Universe's most violent happenings". 'The Swift telescope is about to break the boundaries of our cosmic vision, to see the most distant objects ever recorded, its chief scientist believes. The NASA space observatory has already looked nearly 13 billion light-years across the Universe to record the light from a cataclysmic star explosion.But Dr Neil Gehrels expects Swift to see even more distant events.The investigator says the telescope has the ability to observe perhaps the very first stars to shine in the cosmos.