Saving Swift

Update: On August 19, NASA announced a change to this mission. Due to an ongoing issue, the LINK spacecraft will not be able to capture and boost Swift. Instead, LINK will attempt to connect with Swift for data collection. “This is not the outcome we were working toward,” NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said in the announcement. “But it does not change why this mission was worth attempting.”

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is falling. It could burn up in Earth’s atmosphere by autumn. NASA wants to save it. On July 3, a spacecraft called Link was launched. It’s now on a first-of-its-kind rescue mission.

Swift has spent nearly 22 years in orbit. It hunts for gamma-ray bursts. These are explosions in space. Swift has found nearly 1,800 of them. But its altitude has been dropping. This is due to drag from Earth’s atmosphere. Swift has no thrusters to boost it back up.

Lynn Cominsky is a professor of physics and astronomy. She is also Swift’s press officer. Cominsky says Swift is worth saving. It’s “unique in its ability to monitor the entire sky,” she told TIME for Kids. Plus, it can be “quickly repointed to regions of interest,” making it efficient.

Active Mission

In 2025, NASA chose Katalyst Space to help. Katalyst is a company in Arizona. In eight months, it built the spacecraft Link. The plan is for Link to approach Swift and use its robotic arms to capture the observatory. Link’s thrusters can lift Swift to higher orbit.

SHAKE IT UP Katalyst engineers test Link in a NASA vibration chamber on April 15.

Things haven’t gone smoothly. On July 28, Katalyst reported that Link was spinning. The team is making system changes. The spinning is slowing down. Approach is predicted for the end of August.

“The mission remains active,” Katalyst said in a statement. “We continue to believe that with these changes, Link has a viable × viable capable of succeeding (adjective) path to rendezvous × rendezvous to meet up (verb) with Swift.”