Category: Swift

NASA successfully launches the Swift unmanned deep space observatory after a small delay. Carrying three different instrument packages, Swift’s mission is specifically to observe, categorize and study the aftereffects of gamma ray bursts. The satellite is designed to aim itself at any such bursts that it detects within mere seconds so it can catch the short-lived aftereffects and relay its findings to ground controllers. It is believed that some of the bursts are caused by the dying collapse of stars, and possibly the formation of black holes, and as such may be some of the most powerful energy releases known in nature. Swift is expected to observe as many as 100 gamma ray bursts per year.

Developed in under a year to rendezvous, dock with, and boost the orbit of NASA’s aging Swift Space Telescope, Katalyst Space’s LINK spacecraft is launched. Riding a Pegasus XL rocket launched from an airborne aircraft, LINK arrives in orbit and passes its initial checkout phase, getting the greenlight to proceed to its rendezvous. The Swift Telescope was launched in 2004, and has proven to be one of NASA’s most productive orbiting observatories. In a scenario not unlike that which doomed the Skylab space station in 1979, solar flare activity has caused expansion of Earth’s atmosphere, increasing drag on the Swift spacecraft. Taking a month to reach Swift, LINK is expected to grapple onto the older spacecraft and fire its thrusters to push Swift into a higher orbit, where the otherwise perfectly functional telescope can continue its campaign of observations for years to come. (LINK’s mission also bears some resemblance to a proposed mission to boost Skylab’s orbit before it re-entered the atmosphere in 1979.) Left unchecked, Swift would re-enter the atmosphere in October. If LINK’s mission is successful, the Swift Telescope will be able to resume its observations in September 2026, and another LINK-style mission could be approved to boost the Hubble Space Telescope.

Just weeks after its launch to boost the orbit of the Swift Space Telescope, it is announced that Katalysy Space’s LINK spacecraft will be unable to fulfill its primary mission after weeks of mishaps with attitude control, reaction control wheels, and power systems. Katalyst will still perform an approach and rendezvous test maneuver in the vicinity of the slowly deorbiting Swift Telescope, but LINK will be unable to save the larger spacecraft from its fate, and will in fact plunge back into Earth’s atmosphere in September, before Swift does the same. Katalyst Space and NASA state that the mission, constructed and launched at a much faster pace than most space missions, still produced useful data for the next attempt to reboost a satellite.

Katalyst Space’s LINK uncrewed spacecraft, launched in July after a crash development and construction program to boost the orbit of the Swift Space Telescope, re-enters Earth’s atmosphere after a series of technical mishaps prevented it from carrying out its mission. Without the planned orbital assist from LINK, and with its orbit decaying faster than planned due to increased solar flare activity causing drag from expansion of Earth’s atmosphere (much like the fate of the Skylab space station), Swift will re-enter Earth’s atmosphere sometime in October.