NASA is racing to save an ageing telescope from falling back to Earth with a daring rescue mission. The $30 million salvage operation gets underway as soon as this week with the planned launch of a robotic lifesaver. NASA hired startup Katalyst Space Technologies to boost the Swift Observatory to a higher orbit where it can continue hunting for some of the universe’s biggest explosions. A three-armed spacecraft built by Katalyst will chase after Swift once it takes off from an atoll in the Pacific’s Marshall Islands aboard an aeroplane-launched Pegasus rocket. Liftoff could occur as early as Tuesday.
Scanning the cosmos since its launch in 2004, Swift has been sinking faster and faster because of recent intense solar activity. It needs to get to a higher, more stable orbit as soon as possible to survive.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope — also at risk — could be next. Like Swift, Hubble is losing altitude as the sun erupts with one flare after another. Katalyst Space CEO Ghonhee Lee said his company’s next-generation robot, still in development, could save the day for the much bigger Hubble in a couple of years.
Only China has attempted a mission like the upcoming one, 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 said. “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.” It will take Katalyst’s autonomous spacecraft, named Lift, about a month to rendezvous with Swift and catch it, and another couple of months to raise its orbit from the current 360 km to the desired 600 km.
The 1.6-tonne (1.4-metric tonne) gamma ray observatory must be above 300 km for the rescue to work. It’s expected to reach that point of no return in October, according to the latest estimates.
Roughly the size of a small kitchen refrigerator with a 40-ft solar wingspan, Lift sports three arms with a reach of just over 3 ft. Each arm has two finger-like pinching grippers that resemble the hands of a Lego mini figure.
If all goes well, Swift could be back in business by September, according to Lee.
Worth hundreds of millions of dollars, Swift was never designed to be repaired, let alone retrieved by hands — human or otherwise. That’s what makes this so challenging, according to company officials.
