There will be no rescue. NASA has cancelled the piece of the mission that counted: no spacecraft will lift the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory back to a safe altitude, and the telescope is now expected to fall back into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up before the year is out.
The plan called for Katalyst Space’s LINK spacecraft to dock with the satellite and push it higher. That is no longer happening. NASA attributed the call to LINK’s attitude control failure, a problem that emerged in late July and never improved.
The spin that ended it
When the fault first appeared, NASA reported that the vehicle could not hold its orientation in orbit and was tumbling out of control. Contact with LINK became intermittent, and part of its thruster system stopped working as well.
Only last month, both NASA and Katalyst were still insisting the spacecraft could complete the job. That confidence has now evaporated.
Less than a year to build a rescue vehicle
Katalyst was given fewer than 12 months to design the spacecraft behind the Swift Boost mission, which lifted off in early July. No flight hardware is normally built on a schedule like that.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman, who directs the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, had labelled it a “high-risk, high-reward mission” from day one. It had never been attempted before, and the team was in a race against an orbit decaying faster because of rising solar activity over recent years.
What’s actually being lost
Swift went up in 2004 with gamma ray bursts as its target. In the years since, astronomers have aimed it at a much wider range of objects, and NASA has relied on it to capture critical information quickly whenever something happens suddenly in the sky.
A successful boost would have added roughly another decade of life. Instead, the agency says it will focus on identifying “new options to react rapidly to cosmic events,” while relying on missions already in operation to fill the gap for now.
LINK still has one job left
LINK will still try to rendezvous with Swift — an approach and nothing more, with no towing and no change in altitude.
NASA and Katalyst intend to extract every bit of data they can from those rendezvous operations and pass it along to future satellite servicing efforts. That is the salvage value on offer, and it is far from worthless.
“This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future. We are going to learn everything we can from LINK’s rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow.”
Keep an eye on how LINK behaves during the approach. That telemetry is all that separates this attempt from a complete write-off, and it will decide whether the next servicing mission begins from firmer ground than this one did.