GoKawiilBROOMFIELD, Colorado—One of NASA’s oldest astronomy missions, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, has been out of action for more than a month as scientists await the arrival of a pioneering robotic rescue mission.
The 21-year-old spacecraft is falling out of orbit, and NASA officials believe it’s worth saving—for the right price. Swift is not a flagship astronomy mission like Hubble or Webb, so there’s no talk of sending astronauts or spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a rescue expedition. Hubble was upgraded by five space shuttle missions, and billionaire and commercial astronaut Jared Isaacman—now NASA’s administrator—proposed a privately funded mission to service Hubble in 2022, but the agency rejected the idea.
Swift may be a more suitable target for a first-of-a-kind commercial rescue mission. It has cost roughly $500 million (adjusted for inflation) to build, launch, and operate, but it is significantly less expensive than Hubble, so the consequences of a botched rescue would be far less severe. Last September, NASA awarded a company named Katalyst Space Technologies a $30 million contract to rapidly build and launch a commercial satellite to stabilize Swift’s orbit and extend its mission.
The Swift observatory is flying in low-Earth orbit, where the outermost layers of the atmosphere still exert some aerodynamic influence on satellites. The spacecraft launched in November 2004 on a mission to detect gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the known Universe. Despite its age, astrophysicists still rely on Swift’s multi-wavelength instruments to identify and locate gamma-ray bursts for follow-up observations by other observatories.
Gamma-ray bursts happen without warning, when massive stars die and form black holes or during mergers of neutron stars and black holes. Their afterglow can last from a few seconds to up to a few hours. Scientists need satellites like Swift to find and study them. One of Swift’s unique abilities is to quickly turn to point toward gamma-ray sources before they fade, a proficiency that gave the mission its name. Until last month, the mission remained operational and scientifically productive, and there is no other US satellite that fully replicates Swift’s capabilities.