A private company will give a powerful NASA space telescope a new lease on life next year, if all goes according to plan.<\/p>\n
Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies has scored a contract to raise the altitude of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory<\/a>, which has been hunting for gamma-ray bursts<\/a> (GRBs) from low Earth orbit<\/a> (LEO) for more than two decades.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sparse molecules in the wispy outer reaches of Earth’s atmosphere<\/a> have been dragging Swift down over the years, and this process has ramped up recently thanks to increased solar activity<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n “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<\/a> that announced the new plan.<\/p>\n “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 \u2014 expanding the use of satellite<\/a> servicing to a new and broader class of spacecraft.”<\/p>\n Swift launched to LEO in 2004. It detects GRBs, which are intense blasts of radiation that result from some of the most energetic events in the universe \u2014 the deaths of massive stars, for example, or mergers between two black holes<\/a>.<\/p>\n “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<\/a> works,” NASA officials said in the same statement.<\/p>\n