NASA calls off mission to rescue Swift gamma-ray observatory - Ars Technica

Overview

NASA calls off mission to rescue Swift gamma-ray observatory

Without a rescue, NASA’s Swift Observatory is expected to reenter the atmosphere later this year.

Details

NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on a robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit.

The rescue satellite, named Link, launched July 3 on a journey to fly up to NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, capture it with three robotic arms, and boost its orbit high enough to escape a looming reentry. Link is about the size of a refrigerator, with two power-generating solar arrays and three xenon-fueled electric thrusters to send Swift into a safer, higher orbit.

Katalyst, the startup leading the Swift rescue effort, said Wednesday that “ongoing attitude control issues” will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link’s remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite’s close-in navigation system.

“While the mission will not have the ending we originally intended, NASA and Katalyst are assessing what milestones remain ahead,” Katalyst said in a statement. “We will continue working to extract technical and operational value from the spacecraft.”

The Swift rescue mission was always risky. NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract less than a year ago to build and launch the Link satellite. NASA said Katalyst had to launch the rescue mission by this summer in order to reach Swift before it falls back into Earth’s atmosphere and burns up.

“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting.”

NASA gave Katalyst a remarkably tight schedule. It usually takes several years to ready a first-of-its-kind satellite for launch. Katalyst did it in nine months. The timeline forced hard trade-offs, with the schedule driving engineers to tolerate technical risks they might not otherwise accept. Everything seemed to go well during the satellite’s first few weeks in orbit.

That changed in late July when the Link spacecraft suddenly spun out of control. Katalyst hasn’t said what caused the problem, but two of the satellite’s three reaction wheels, used for attitude control, stopped working. There were also issues with cold gas thrusters used for finer pointing control. That left the satellite’s three low-impulse plasma thrusters as the only means of regaining control of Link’s orientation as it zipped around the Earth at nearly 5 miles per second.

“Katalyst designed, developed, and launched an experimental spacecraft to go after an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline,” Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said. “We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way. We have already learned a tremendous amount, and now our job is to turn those lessons into something durable—building a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing.”

Artist’s illustration of the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

Katalyst is one of several US companies working on satellite servicing. These kinds of missions could eventually refuel, repair, or upgrade satellites. The rendezvous sensors and robotic arms used by Katalyst are crucial technologies for future servicing missions.

“Building, testing, and operating this mission has already strengthened America’s space industry pipeline, advancing in-space servicing capabilities in completely new ways,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, which oversees the Swift Observatory. “We’re so proud of this team for: getting to the launch pad in record time, in a record-setting year for NASA astrophysics launches; its innovative problem-solving up to this point; and the dedication to the exciting capabilities this mission will attempt to demonstrate next.”

While there is much to celebrate with Katalyst’s accomplishments, giving up on rescuing Swift will commit the nearly 22-year astrophysics mission to a fiery end. Swift is falling out of orbit and is expected to reenter the atmosphere later this year.

Swift is an old mission that has far outlived its original two-year design, but astronomers still rely on it to detect and study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known Universe. Swift’s unique combination of multi-wavelength instruments and agile pointing allows it to identify and locate gamma-ray bursts for follow-up observations by other observatories.

The problem is Swift lacks thrusters to maintain its orbit, so a rescue effort like Katalyst’s Link mission was the only way to keep the $500 million observatory going.

“We were all hoping for more science from Swift,” Domagal-Goldman said in a statement. “But we knew the takeaways from this mission would be worthwhile either way, and we have gained so much through the series of accomplishments up to this point.”

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Key Takeaways

• NASA calls off mission to rescue Swift gamma-ray observatory

• Without a rescue, NASA’s Swift Observatory is expected to reenter the atmosphere later this year

• NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on a robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit

• The rescue satellite, named Link, launched July 3 on a journey to fly up to NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, capture it with three robotic arms, and boost its orbit high enough to escape a looming reentry

• Katalyst, the startup leading the Swift rescue effort, said Wednesday that “ongoing attitude control issues” will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission