LINK Satellite Launches to Rescue NASA's Swift Telescope
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- NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory has dropped from its original ~600 km altitude to ~375 km since launching in 2004, with its decline accelerating recently because powerful solar flares puffed up Earth's atmosphere and increased drag on the satellite.
- Katalyst Space Technologies, an Arizona startup, built the LINK satellite — under 2 meters tall, roughly one-third Swift's size — equipped with three robotic arms and large solar panels to grab the telescope and fire thrusters to push it higher.
- LINK launched aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket on July 3, in what is intended to be the final flight of the Pegasus XL before the launch vehicle is retired.
- After weeks of in-space testing, LINK will grab Swift and slowly push it upward over roughly two months, restoring it to its original 600 km altitude and potentially extending operations by up to a decade.
- Swift, originally built to study gamma-ray bursts, has detected about 1,800 of those explosions since 2004 and has also made discoveries about comets, planets, supernovae, and black holes.
- Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee framed the mission as creating a 'blueprint for servicing spacecraft that were never designed for on-orbit maintenance,' naming the Hubble Space Telescope — predicted to fall in the 2030s without a boost — as a potential future beneficiary.
Why it matters: Katalyst's mission attempts something NASA has never done — grabbing a satellite never designed for in-orbit servicing and boosting it. CEO Ghonhee Lee calls it a 'blueprint' for cheaply rescuing other aging spacecraft, with the Hubble Space Telescope — predicted to fall in the 2030s without a boost — as the obvious next target.
