NASA races to save aging Swift telescope from fiery reentry

NASA and Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies are racing to prevent the aging Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory from disintegrating while reentering Earth’s atmosphere. A robotic spacecraft developed by Katalyst remains on track to capture the 21-year-old telescope and boost it into a higher, safer orbit, according to a NASA update released July 15.

Katalyst’s LINK spacecraft launched aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket released from an aircraft over the Marshall Islands on July 3. The contract, awarded to Katalyst last September, gave the company under a year to turn a rescue spacecraft from a blueprint to a working machine in orbit, condensing a rescue timeline of years into months.

Swift, which studies gramma-ray bursts and other high-energy cosmic events in X-ray, ultraviolet and gamma-ray light, has operated since 2004. Increased solar activity in recent months has thickened Earth’s upper atmosphere, and the added drag has pulled the spacecraft down toward reentry well ahead of earlier projections.

By NASA’s account, LINK is holding well and is roughly midway through the checkout process engineers use to prepare a new spacecraft for operation. Its power and electronics systems have cleared review, and its thrusters have already been test-fired in orbit. Once that work wraps up, the spacecraft will begin the long chase toward Swift, then spend several months capturing the observatory and raising it to a higher orbit.

Nicky Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, believes the telescope exhibits unique capabilities, but told CBS News that NASA currently cannot afford to replace the telescope with a new one. mission.

Kevork Abazajian, a UCI professor of physics and astronomy and director of the university’s Center for Cosmology, said rescuing Swift instead of replacing it is a straightforward financial decision.

“Swift costs roughly a quarter-billion dollars to build and launch in 2004; the rescue contract is about $30 million,” Abazajian told New University. “For a fraction of replacement cost, NASA keeps a workhorse that still has no true successor.”

Abazajian said that this calculation carries extra weight in a funding climate where new astrophysics missions routinely face long delays and tight budgets, making an extension of Swift one of the highest-return investments available to the agency right now.

“Swift was designed as a two-year gamma-ray burst mission,” Abazajian said. “Twenty-one years later it’s still one of the most scientifically productive spacecrafts NASA operates… that’s the kind of asset you don’t let burn up if there’s a viable alternative.”

Abazajian said Swift’s value extends beyond its own observations. Its ability to repoint its instruments toward a new target within minutes makes it a key trigger for astronomers across the field, alerting other observatories when gravitational-wave detectors or neutrino observatories flag a cosmic event.

“Swift is the sky’s first responder,” Abazajian said.

The telescope also factors into Abazajian’s own research into dark matter. His group’s work helped inspire a 2014 finding of a still-debated X-ray signal that could indicate decaying dark matter particles by a Chandra X-ray team at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

“More broadly, colleagues at the UCI Center for Cosmology work on transients, compact objects, high-energy astrophysics and the growth of structure across cosmic time… all areas where Swift’s rapid-response data feed directly into what we do,” Abazajian said.

If the mission succeeds, Abazajian said it would reshape how NASA thinks about aging spacecrafts.

“If LINK succeeds in grabbing a satellite that was never built to be grabbed, it demonstrates that even legacy missions can be extended, and future missions will be designed for serviceability from day one,” he said.

UCI professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering Yuri Shimane, who is also head of the UCI’s eXploration Logistics & Control Group, said the mission is largely uncharted territory from an engineering standpoint.

“The control side presents clear challenges, such as how to perform relative navigation and docking with a target that was not designed to be serviced,” Shimane told New University.

Shimane said the mission builds on earlier spacecraft servicing efforts, including astronaut servicing missions to the Hubble Space Telescope and commercial satellite servicing missions.

“This mission is certainly a first in servicing a telescope with a robotic spacecraft, also with such a quick turnaround,” Shimane said.

The sheer pace of activity across the industry is notable for students eyeing careers in the field, according to Shimane.

“It is a prime example of the ‘New Space’ industry, where companies, government agencies and academic groups are all working on first-of-their-kind space missions,” Shimane said. “Developments like these are happening constantly, making the space industry an especially exciting field to be involved in.”

NASA expects LINK to spend the next several months approaching Swift, inspecting the observatory and attempting to capture it before boosting it into a higher orbit, according to the agency’s Swift Boost mission page.

Aadya Mishra is a News Intern for the summer 2026 quarter. She can be reached at aadyam2@uci.edu.

Edited by Anika Denny and Elizabeth Gregg.