NASA is commencing a $30 million rescue mission as soon as this week to nudge a space observatory to a higher orbit before it falls back to the planet.
The Swift Observatory, launched in 2004, studies some of the most energetic explosions in the universe and has been falling back to Earth due to recent higher-than-usual solar activity. NASA hired Katalyst Space Technologies to save the observatory, which comprises three specialized telescopes, by lifting it to a more stable orbit.
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Katalyst’s autonomous spacecraft, named Link, will be deployed as early as Tuesday on a plane-launched rocket over the Pacific and features three arms, each with a claw that has been likened to the hand of a Lego minifigure. The midair launch from a plane allows greater flexibility than pad-launched rockets, as a plane can release the rocket virtually anywhere over the ocean for an optimal orbit.
“This is the first American space robot to go up and do anything like this,” Katalyst CEO Ghonhee 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 roughly a month to rendezvous with Swift and another two months to lift it to the correct orbit. Swift must remain above 185 miles for the mission to work — it sits at 224 miles currently — and it is expected to reach that point of no return in October.
There is no guarantee the mission will succeed, Katalyst officials said, as Swift was never designed for a repair or recovery mission, but NASA says it is well worth the effort.
“If we let Swift reenter, we would lose that telescope. We would lose a lot of capability,” NASA’s science mission chief, Nicky Fox, said. “We don’t currently have the budget to build another one to replace that.”
Swift was designed to study gamma ray bursts, the brightest and most violent stellar explosions in the cosmos, and complements the research conducted by the James Webb Space Telescope, whose images and science have yielded unprecedented information about the age and evolution of the universe. By detecting such an explosion, Swift acts as an alarm that points the Webb telescope in its direction for further investigation.
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Lifting NASA’s much larger Hubble Space Telescope, which is also losing altitude due to solar activity, could be next for Katalyst, which is developing a next-generation spacecraft capable of such a mission. The company said the rescue could be undertaken in the next two years.
“It’s a national treasure,” Fox said. “People love Hubble.”
