NASA’s Swift Boost Mission Will Launch Later This Month To Rescue A Falling Telescope

The NASA Swift Boost mission is on track to launch later this month to rescue the Neil Gehrels Swift observatory, whose orbit is decaying faster than anticipated. In other words, the space telescope is falling apart too fast, and the agency intends to catch up with it and keep it in space for a few more years than it will last without any intervention. As per publication spaceThe launch is scheduled for June 27.

NASA last year teamed up with Arizona company Catalyst Space to build Link, a robotic spacecraft designed to dock with the observatory and lift it into a higher orbit. On June 9, engineers at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia finished installing the link into the Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket. A few days later, on June 12, they attached the rocket to the belly of a Northrop Grumman aircraft named Stargazer. The aircraft departed Wallops on June 18 for Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific Ocean, where it would take off a week later.

Stargazer will take the Pegasus XL to an altitude of about 40,000 feet before releasing it into the air. The rocket will free fall for a few seconds before turning on its motors and delivering Link to space in about 10 minutes. While all satellites in orbit lose altitude over time, the Swift telescope’s orbital decay has been faster than others. NASA explained that this is because the observatory is experiencing more atmospheric drag than expected due to the recent increase in the Sun’s activity.

“Given how rapidly Swift’s orbit is decaying, we are in a race against time, but by leveraging commercial technologies already in development, we are meeting this challenge,” said NASA’s Shawn Domagal-Goldman at the announcement of the agency’s partnership with Catalyst.

The Swift telescope was launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, although it is now being used as a general-purpose multi-wavelength observatory. NASA says Swift acts as a “dispatcher” when a sudden event occurs in the universe, providing vital information that allows other observatories to follow up and learn more. For example, it determined the location of an X-ray source, which later turned out to be a 13 billion-year-old supernova based on data collected by other observatories such as the James Webb Telescope.