Imagine this scenario: you have an important space telescope that’s rapidly sinking in altitude, slated to crash down to Earth next year unless you can nudge it back up.
NASA officials are facing that exact predicament as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is set to fall from its orbit at the end of 2026, according to Space.com — but the agency has green lit an audacious plan that’s one for the history books: a plane drops a rocket in mid air that’s carrying a robotic satellite, which will then blast into space and boost the telescope’s altitude, thereby saving it.
Arizona-based private space company Katalyst Space Technologies, charged by NASA to save the space telescope, announced Wednesday details of this important mission — and with a tight launch schedule set for June 2026.
The company will be using Northrop Grumman’s L-1011 Stargazer aircraft, a former passenger airliner, to ferry the Pegasus XL air-launched rocket to an altitude of 39,000 feet. In mid-flight, the airplane will then drop the Pegasus rocket, which will fire its thrusters, venture into space, and release the robotic Katalyst spacecraft close to the location of the Swift telescope. The robotic spacecraft will then rendezvous with and capture the space telescope, and boost its altitude to a higher orbit so that the Swift can continue its mission for another 10 plus years.
What’s absolutely bonkers about the mission, besides it apparently being the first time a commercial spacecraft is boosting an uncrewed government satellite, according to Space.com, is that it typically takes up to 24 months to plan and then launch a similar mission — and Katalyst only has a matter of months.
“We are treating this launch date as a firm commitment,” Katalyst vice president of technology Kieran Wilson told the publication. “We’ll kind of continuously evaluate where Swift stands in its orbital decay and figure out what sort of adaptations we might need to pursue, whether it’s launching to a different altitude, whether it’s targeting slightly different insertions.”
NASA launched the Swift space telescope back in November 2004 to low Earth orbit with the mission to study gamma ray bursts, intense explosions of energy in space that happens when massive stars die, two neutron stars collide, or a neutron star and a black hole smash into each other — epic events that can result in a new black hole, shooting jets of accelerated particles that provide fascinating clues.
The problem with the Swift is that it has no propulsion jets on board to fix its orbit, which has decayed from 373 miles to about 249 miles, according to Katalyst, as Earth’s atmosphere drags it down.
“Swift’s orbital decay demands an urgent mission, launching before atmospheric drag makes recovery impossible,” reads the Katalyst statement.
The Katalyst robotic spacecraft has three mechanical arms abroad which will catch the Swift telescope in a delicate maneuver, making sure the observatory and the spacecraft are not harmed in the process. Then it will bring the Swift back to the appropriate altitude of 373 miles.
With the Swift telescope originally costing $500 million and the entire rescue mission budgeted at only $30 million, it’s an efficient use of funds.
NASA has done similar service missions with the Hubble Space Telescope in the past — but those were crewed missions, while this project to save the Swift will be entirely remote controlled.
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