Northrop Grumman’s Stargazer plane departs NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia on June 18, carrying the Pegasus XL rocket and LINK spacecraft certain for the Marshall Islands. Credit score: NASA/Jeanette Kazmierczak
An airplane started its journey throughout the Pacific on Thursday, June 18, with a rocket strapped to its stomach. Inside that rocket was a rescue mission — a small robotic spacecraft that, later this month, will dock with an working house telescope and hopefully increase its orbit.
The goal is NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a gamma-ray burst (GRB) telescope that has been shedding altitude extra shortly than anticipated, due to elevated photo voltaic exercise that has intensified drag on the craft because it skims our outer environment. In September 2025, NASA awarded Katalyst House Applied sciences of Flagstaff, Arizona, a $30 million contract to construct the rescuer — a robotic spacecraft referred to as LINK — and get it to Swift in below a 12 months. Swift Enhance, because the mission is thought, is at the moment scheduled to launch in late June from Kwajalein Atoll within the Marshall Islands. If it succeeds, will probably be the primary time an autonomous robotic spacecraft has captured and boosted a satellite tv for pc not initially designed for servicing.
“The Swift Enhance mission is designed to increase the lifetime of an current spacecraft, one not designed for servicing, shortly and cheaply,” mentioned Katalyst House CEO Ghonhee Lee in a NASA press release.
A telescope in hassle
Swift launched in November 2004 on a Delta 7320 rocket to review GRBs, excessive flashes of gamma radiation now understood to outcome from the collisions of huge, compact objects in addition to the beginning of black holes. The explosions happen round as soon as a day, come from each route, and final from milliseconds to some hundred seconds. Swift’s devices have been designed to seize GRBs and alert different telescopes worldwide.
The observatory has delivered nicely past its authentic mission. Swift imaged its first GRB shortly after launch, in January 2005. By Could 2005 it had completed what no mission had managed earlier than: pinpointing the placement of a brief GRB — bursts that peak in below two seconds — exactly sufficient to watch its afterglow. That detection, referred to as GRB 050509B, lasted simply 0.03 second, and confirmed fashions that proposed quick GRBs come from neutron star collisions. Within the twenty years since, Swift has logged greater than a thousand GRBs, detected the brightest burst ever recorded, and branched into research of tidal disruption occasions (as black holes rip aside stars), magnetars (extremely magnetic neutron stars), supernovae, and even comets in our personal photo voltaic system.
Sadly, Swift has no propulsion system. Any spacecraft in low Earth orbit loses altitude over time, pulled down by atmospheric drag. And when the Solar is extra energetic, the environment expands and the drag intensifies. Swift launched at an altitude of 373 miles (600 kilometers). It has now sunk to round 249 miles (400 km). The Solar reached photo voltaic most in 2024, sending out elevated bursts of charged particles and accelerating Swift’s decline. Predictions made by NASA in 2025 confirmed a 50% likelihood of the telescope reentering the environment halfway via 2026 and a 90% likelihood of reentry by the tip of the 12 months.
RELATED: Photo voltaic exercise determines how briskly house junk falls to Earth
The Swift operations crew at NASA’s Goddard House Flight Middle in Greenbelt, Maryland, has been shopping for time. In February, the crew suspended observations to place the spacecraft in an orientation that minimizes drag. The objective is to maintain Swift above 185 miles (300 km) — the minimal altitude at which a reboost try is viable. The newest predictions recommend it would maintain above that threshold into early fall, hopefully lengthy sufficient for the rescue try to succeed.
Katalyst for change
Katalyst House Applied sciences is a small Flagstaff, Arizona-based firm that builds autonomous robotic spacecraft designed to service, restore, and prolong the lives of satellites already in orbit.
As soon as awarded the contract for reinforcing Swift, the corporate had lower than a 12 months to design, construct, check, and launch LINK. “Six months in the past, this [mission] was a PowerPoint and it appeared nothing like this,” mentioned Kieran Wilson, LINK lead at Katalyst, in a NASA video released June 17. “In below a 12 months, we’re going from identification of an issue, proposal, contract award to launch.”
The problem of boosting Swift is compounded by the truth that the observatory was by no means constructed with docking {hardware} in thoughts — no exterior grapple fixtures, no docking ports. “No one took an image of the bottom of Swift earlier than it launched,” Lee informed Aerospace America. To beat this, Katalyst designed a customized robotic seize mechanism consisting of three arms guided by LiDAR (Gentle Detection and Ranging) to connect to a characteristic on Swift’s major construction with out disturbing its devices.
The highway to launch
By November, Katalyst had chosen Northrop Grumman’s Pegasus XL as its launch car. It was chosen partly as a result of Swift sits at a low angle relative to the equator that almost all rockets launching from the U.S. can’t simply attain. Pegasus, dropped from an airplane whereas at 40,000 ft (12,190 meters), can launch from practically wherever on Earth, making it a straightforward selection for hitting Swift’s orbit on the compressed timeline. “It’s the one launch car that may meet the orbit, the schedule, and the associated fee to attain one thing unprecedented with rising expertise,” Lee mentioned in a November Katalyst press release.
LINK completed environmental testing at NASA Goddard on Could 4, the place engineers put it via vibration checks to simulate the intense situations of a Pegasus launch and ran thermal vacuum checks inside the identical chamber used for Swift and the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman House Telescope. Throughout these checks, LINK fired its xenon-powered ion thrusters and deployed certainly one of its three LiDAR-equipped robotic arms. After testing, the spacecraft made a closing cease at Katalyst’s facility in Broomfield, Colorado, for final pre-launch preparations earlier than transport east.
On June 5, LINK arrived at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, the place Northrop Grumman engineers loaded it into the rocket. Integration was complete by June 9. Three days later, on June 12, the rocket was coupled with Stargazer, Northrop Grumman’s modified L-1011 plane, and the mixture was prepared for departure.
Stargazer left Wallops on June 18, making stops in California and Hawaii en path to Kwajalein Atoll within the Republic of the Marshall Islands. When the launch window opens later this month, the plane will climb to roughly 40,000 ft (12,190 m) and launch Pegasus XL. After just a few seconds of free fall, the rocket will ignite, and attain orbit in about 10 minutes.
As soon as in orbit, the rocket will deploy LINK. Then, the Katalyst crew will spend a number of weeks checking LINK’s techniques and surveying Swift to find out potential attachment factors earlier than trying seize. When LINK has secured the telescope, it would hearth its thrusters and start the months-long strategy of elevating Swift’s orbit.
The way forward for on-orbit servicing
Orbit-boosting isn’t new — house shuttle crews raised Hubble’s orbit a number of occasions over a number of missions. However these have been crewed missions to a telescope purpose-built for servicing. Swift Enhance is one thing completely different: a business, autonomous operation on a compressed timeline, concentrating on a spacecraft no person deliberate to service.
“The Swift increase try is a quick, high-risk, high-reward mission. Swift will seemingly reenter the environment someday later this 12 months if we don’t try to carry it to a better altitude. Katalyst has gotten so far in simply eight months, and we’re glad they have been ready to make use of NASA’s amenities to check LINK and draw on our experience,” said John Van Eepoel, Swift’s mission director at NASA Goddard.
Past the science, Katalyst says it’s working with the U.S. Division of Protection to make use of Swift Enhance to exhibit quick-turnaround satellite tv for pc servicing capabilities, which the Pentagon considers important as China is advancing its personal comparable capabilities. The corporate additionally has a mission referred to as NEXUS deliberate for 2027 that may prolong servicing capabilities to geostationary orbit, roughly 22,000 miles above Earth, the place most of the climate and communications satellites that underpin fashionable infrastructure reside.
If LINK succeeds, the implications prolong past Swift. Speedy-response satellite tv for pc servicing may open a wholly new sector of the orbital financial system — one the place satellites are repaired and repositioned fairly than discarded — whereas decreasing the particles burden in an more and more crowded low Earth orbit.
