NASA's Swift Boost mission will launch later this month to rescue a falling telescope
NASA's Swift Boost mission is set for June 27 to rendezvous with the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and boost it to a higher orbit, as its orbit is decaying faster than expected.
The Swift Boost rescue mission is heading to space soon to extend the life of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. The space telescope's orbit is decaying faster than anticipated, so NASA plans to dock with it and tow it to a higher orbit, keeping it operational for a few more years than it would have lasted without intervention.
According to Space magazine, launch is scheduled for June 27. NASA partnered with Arizona-based Katalyst Space last year to build LINK, a robotic spacecraft designed to dock with the observatory and tug it to a higher orbit. On June 9, engineers at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia finished installing LINK on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket. A few days later, on June 12, they attached the rocket to the belly of a Northrop Grumman plane called Stargazer.
The Stargazer plane left Wallops on June 18 for Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean, where it will take off in a week. Stargazer will carry Pegasus XL to an altitude of about 40,000 feet before releasing it. The rocket will free-fall for a few seconds, then fire its motors and deliver LINK to space in approximately 10 minutes.
While all satellites lose altitude over time, Swift's orbital decay has been faster than most. NASA explains that this is because the observatory has been experiencing more atmospheric drag than expected due to recent increases in solar activity. "Given how quickly Swift's orbit is decaying, we are in a race against the clock, but by leveraging commercial technologies that are already in development, we are meeting this challenge head-on," said NASA's Shawn Domagal-Goldman when the partnership with Katalyst was announced.
The Swift telescope launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, but it is now used as a general-purpose multi-wavelength observatory. NASA says Swift serves as a "dispatcher" when a sudden event occurs in the universe, providing critical information that allows other observatories to follow up and learn more. For instance, it detected the location of an X-ray source that turned out to be a 13-billion-year-old supernova, based on data subsequently gathered by other observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope.
