NASA’s newly renamed Swift Mission spies a comet slowdown

Observations by NASA’s Swift spacecraft, now renamed the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory after the mission’s late principal investigator, have captured an unprecedented change in the rotation of a comet. Images taken in May 2017 reveal that comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák—41P for short—was spinning three times slower than it was in March, when it was observed by the Discovery Channel Telescope at Lowell Observatory in Arizona.