NASA has selected Arizona company Katalyst to save the Swift Observatory from its degrading orbit and will use the company’s air-launched rocket to do so. Dropped by a Northrop Grumman L-1011 Stargazer aircraft, the Pegasus solid rocket will look to catch the satellite and boost its orbit back beyond the frictional grasping of Earth’s upper atmosphere.
The Swift Observatory was launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts—the largest explosions in the universe as far as we know—and has been doing so readily and steadily since then. However, its initial 373-mile orbit has decayed significantly over the years, and now, at around 250 miles above Earth’s surface, it’s at risk of deorbiting entirely as early as next year. Now NASA is rushing against the clock to save it.
“[Pegasus is] the only launch vehicle that can meet the orbit, the schedule and the cost to achieve something unprecedented with emerging technology,” Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said in a statement (via Space.com).
Credit: Katalyst Space Technologies
Although the rocket is not particularly powerful, only lifting around 1,000 pounds into low Earth orbit, it’s crucially ready to launch in the very near future and could hit the orbital plane that Swift operates in.
“We have to do some final integration and test, and we have to develop the trajectory and the guidance for the RAAN [right ascension of the ascending node] steering and software, but that’s really it,” Katalyst’s director of space launch, Kurt Eberly, told Space.com.
The mission will use a larger variant of the rocket known as Pegasus XL, and is on target to launch in June 2026. Katalyst said this is a hard launch date, as it doesn’t have much longer to get the telescope into a higher orbit before its decay accelerates beyond where it would be recoverable.
The Katalyst spacecraft will spend some time matching its orbit with the Swift Observatory before capturing it and boosting its orbit back to its original 373 miles above the Earth. Hopefully, this will give the observatory another two decades of life and science.