Business · Engadget
NASA's Swift Boost mission is readying later this month to rescue a falling telescope
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The Swift Boost rescue mission will soon head to space.
Key facts
- On June 9, engineers at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia finished installing LINK to a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket
- The Swift telescope launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, though it's now being used as a general-purpose multi-wavelength observatory
- Stargazer will carry Pegasus XL to an altitude of around 40,000 feet before releasing it in the air
- The rocket will free fall for a few seconds before firing its motors and delivering LINK to space in approximately 10 minutes
Summary
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. NASA teamed up with Arizona company Katalyst Space last year to build LINK, a robotic spacecraft designed to dock with the observatory and tug it to a higher orbit. Stargazer will carry Pegasus XL to an altitude of around 40,000 feet before releasing it in the air. "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 agency's partnership with Katalyst was announced. The Swift telescope launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts, though it's now being used as a general-purpose multi-wavelength observatory.