NASA races to save Swift telescope from falling back

NASA races – NASA is preparing an ambitious, robotic rescue mission to lift the Swift Observatory to a safer orbit after the telescope’s altitude began dropping faster due to recent intense solar activity. The $30 million operation is set to launch as soon as Tuesday, with

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA is moving with urgency. Swift Observatory, an aging gamma ray telescope that has watched the universe’s most violent explosions since 2004, is sinking faster and faster toward a point where it will have to be lost.

The agency is now racing to save it with a $30 million salvage operation that begins as soon as this week. using a planned robotic launch. The plan sends a “robotic lifesaver” toward Swift in a carefully choreographed sequence: a three-armed spacecraft designed to catch up. grab hold. and raise Swift’s orbit before it can fall back to Earth.

NASA hired startup Katalyst Space Technologies to boost Swift to a higher. more stable orbit so it can keep hunting gamma ray bursts and other dramatic cosmic events. The rescue spacecraft. named Link. will lift off from an atoll in the Pacific’s Marshall Islands aboard an airplane-launched Pegasus rocket. with liftoff as early as Tuesday.

Swift’s problem is tied directly to the sun. The telescope has been losing altitude faster because of recent intense solar activity. NASA says it needs to reach higher orbit as soon as possible to survive.

There is another pressure point: the Hubble Space Telescope. Swift isn’t the only observatory facing the same kind of orbital decline. Hubble is also losing altitude as the sun erupts with one flare after another, and NASA is watching whether it will need help next.

Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said the company’s next-generation robot—still in development—could save the day for Hubble in a couple years.

Only China has attempted a mission like the one coming now, successfully boosting a satellite into a higher graveyard orbit four years ago.

“This is the first American space robot to go up and do anything like this,” Lee told The Associated Press. “NASA has all these big senior observatories … all of them can benefit from a service like this. So what we’re proving with this mission is this is a new play in the playbook that’s available.”.

Link will take about a month to rendezvous with Swift and then another couple of months to raise its orbit from the current 224 miles (360 kilometers) to the desired 373 miles (600 kilometers). The plan is precise in ways that leave little room for error: the 1.6-ton (1.4-metric ton) gamma ray observatory must be above 185 miles (300 kilometers) for the rescue to work. NASA estimates that “point of no return” arrives in October.

Link itself is built to operate far from Earth. Roughly the size of a small kitchen refrigerator. it has a 40-foot (12-meter) solar wingspan and three arms designed with grip in mind. Each arm has two finger-like pinching grippers resembling the hands of a Lego mini figure. with a reach of just over 3 feet (1 meter).

If everything goes as planned, Swift could be back in business by September, Lee said.

But there is no guarantee. Swift was never designed to be repaired, let alone retrieved by hands—human or otherwise. Company officials stress there is no certainty the mission will work.

NASA has provided some breathing room. The agency turned off all scientific instruments to slow Swift’s descent, and observations ceased in February.

Even with that delay, the clock is still running. NASA’s astrophysics director, Shawn Domagal-Goldman, framed the effort as something that once seemed beyond reach.

“I have to be honest. No one thought it was going to be possible. No one thought we would get as far as we’ve already gotten today,” he said.

The budget pressure is real, too. NASA’s science mission chief Nicky Fox said losing Swift would mean losing a major capability—and the option to replace it doesn’t exist on a normal timeline.

“If we let Swift reenter, we would lose that telescope. We would lose a lot of capability,” she said. “We don’t currently have the budget to build another one to replace that.”

Swift’s value is tied to its speed. Designed to pivot quickly to capture late-breaking astronomical events such as gamma ray bursts and exploding stars. the telescope would likely face even more demand in the years ahead. With more discoveries expected by the James Webb Space Telescope and soon-to-launch Roman Space Telescope. Swift—if saved—would be busier than ever as “NASA’s first responder.”.

That “responder” mission is also what makes the rescue larger than one telescope to Katalyst. The company sees Swift as a jumping-off point for a new kind of space repair business. Katalyst’s next-generation robotic rescuer is scheduled to fly next year and is planned to tackle satellites as high as 22. 300 miles (35. 800 kilometers) up. Lee envisions hundreds of robots in orbit one day—fixing and hoisting satellites. refueling them. and building solar farms. data centers. and other platforms.

Hubble could be next, with a potential life-extending Katalyst boost scheduled for 2028. Hubble, which is 36 years old, previously received repeat servicing by spacewalking astronauts during the shuttle era. Fox called it a national treasure.

“It’s a national treasure,” she said. “People love Hubble.”

NASA Swift Observatory Katalyst Space Link spacecraft Pegasus rocket Marshall Islands Hubble Space Telescope solar activity space salvage mission