CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A spacecraft equipped with three robotic arms ascended into space on Friday, undertaking a mission to save a NASA telescope in peril of descending uncontrollably back to Earth.
Katalyst Space Technologies’ Link spacecraft commenced its journey from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific, courtesy of Northrop Grumman’s launch.
Riding beneath a specially modified aircraft, the Pegasus rocket propelled Link into space, setting it on a trajectory to rendezvous with and secure NASA’s Swift Observatory in approximately a month’s time.
Swift, which first entered service in 2004, has been descending at an accelerated rate due to recent solar activity.
For a contract of $30 million, NASA has enlisted Katalyst to intercept and elevate the telescope’s orbit, thereby enabling it to persist in observing cosmic phenomena such as gamma-ray bursts and supernovae.
If all goes well, Swift could be back scanning the cosmos by September.
Observations are currently on hold to preserve the telescope’s orbit as long as possible.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope could be a candidate for a similar salvage operation in a few years.
It’s also slipping in altitude because of increased atmospheric drag caused by the sun’s outbursts.
The 1.6-ton (1.4-metric ton) Swift is currently circling 224 miles (360 kilometers) above Earth. Katalyst aims to raise the telescope’s altitude by 150 miles (240 kilometers), back to where it all began.
Link’s thrusters will fire to boost Swift slowly, so there’s no heavy jostling.
Katalyst threw the mission together in just nine months.
NASA insisted on a rush job because the telescope will be too low to recover by the fall.
Without a boost, it’s predicted to plunge to its demise in October.
Bad weather and technical issues caused a series of last-minute launch delays.
“This is a high-risk, high-reward mission,” Katalyst Space CEO Ghonhee Lee said ahead of liftoff. “The biggest danger was always we don’t launch anything and we let Swift burn up in the atmosphere. So we were always trying to avoid that risk, and our team has done that.”