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NASA races to save space telescope with robotic rescue mission

NASA is racing to save an aging 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 the Pacific’s Marshall Islands aboard an airplane-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 said the company’s next-generation robot, still in development, could save the day for the much bigger Hubble in a couple years.

Only China has attempted a mission like the upcoming one, successfully boosting a satellite into a higher graveyard orbit four years ago.

It will take Katalyst’s autonomous spacecraft, named Link, about a month to rendezvous with Swift and catch it, and another couple months to raise its orbit from the current 224 miles to the desired 373 miles.

The 1.6-ton gamma ray observatory must be above 185 miles for the rescue to work. It’s expected to reach that point of no return in October, according to the latest estimates.


Photo provided by NASA shows Kieran Wilson, LINK’s principal investigator, and Hunter Robertson, a space systems engineer, both at Katalyst Space, standing next to their spacecraft inside the Space Environment Simulator at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. (Sophia Roberts/NASA via AP)
 
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