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A personal firm will give a robust NASA area telescope a brand new lease on life subsequent 12 months, if all goes in keeping with plan.
Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies has scored a contract to lift the altitude of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which has been looking for gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) from low Earth orbit (LEO) for greater than 20 years.
Sparse molecules within the wispy outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere have been dragging Swift down over the years, and this process has ramped up recently thanks to increased solar activity (which causes the atmosphere to expand). So NASA tapped Katalyst to build a boosting spacecraft to remedy the situation. It’s expected to launch toward Swift in the spring of 2026, rendezvous with the observatory, and raise its altitude.
Success would be historic: No private spacecraft has ever captured a U.S. government satellite that’s uncrewed, or that wasn’t designed to be serviced in the final frontier, according to NASA.
“Given how quickly Swift’s orbit is decaying, we are in a race against the clock, but by leveraging commercial technologies that are already in development, we are meeting this challenge head-on,” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. said in a Sept. 24 statement that introduced the brand new plan.
“This is a forward-leaning, risk-tolerant approach for NASA,” he added. “But attempting an orbit boost is both more affordable than replacing Swift’s capabilities with a new mission, and beneficial to the nation — expanding the use of satellite servicing to a new and broader class of spacecraft.”
Swift launched to LEO in 2004. It detects GRBs, that are intense blasts of radiation that outcome from among the most energetic occasions within the universe — the deaths of huge stars, for instance, or mergers between two black holes.
“When a rapid, sudden event takes place in the cosmos, Swift serves as a ‘dispatcher,’ providing critical information that allows other ‘first responder’ missions to follow up to learn more about how the universe works,” NASA officers stated in the identical assertion.
“For more than two decades, Swift has led NASA’s missions in providing new insights on these events, together broadening our understanding of everything from exploding stars, stellar flares, and eruptions in active galaxies, to comets and asteroids in our own solar system and high-energy lightning events on Earth,” they added.
Katalyst acquired $30 million to construct the brand new spacecraft by way of NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The firm was already an SBIR participant, which helped allow the accelerated timeline that NASA and Katalyst are concentrating on with the Swift enhance, company officers stated.
And there could also be extra offers like this one coming down the street, they added.
“America’s space economy is brimming with cutting-edge solutions, and opportunities like this allow NASA to tap into them for real-world challenges,” stated Clayton Turner, affiliate administrator for the company’s Space Technology Mission Directorate. “Orbital decay is a common, natural occurrence for satellites, and this collaboration may open the door to extending the life of more spacecraft in the future.”
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