CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.\u00a0\u2014\u00a0A three-armed spacecraft rocketed into orbit Friday to rescue a NASA telescope that\u2019s in danger of crashing back to Earth. <\/p>\n
Northrop Grumman launched Katalyst Space Technologies\u2019 Link spacecraft from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific. <\/p>\n
The Pegasus rocket blasted off from the belly of a modified airplane, putting Link on course to reach and capture NASA\u2019s Swift Observatory in about a month. <\/p>\n
Launched in 2004, Swift is sinking faster than ever because of recent solar storms. NASA is paying $30 million for Katalyst to capture the telescope and boost its orbit so it can continue tracking some of the biggest explosions in the universe, like gamma ray bursts and exploding stars.<\/p>\n
If all goes well, Swift could be back to scanning the cosmos by September. Observations are currently on hold to preserve the telescope\u2019s orbit as long as possible.<\/p>\n
NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope could be a candidate for a similar salvage operation in a few years. It\u2019s also slipping in altitude due to increased atmospheric drag caused by the sun\u2019s outbursts.<\/p>\n
The 1.6-ton Swift currently is circling 224 miles above Earth. Katalyst aims to raise the telescope\u2019s altitude by 150 miles, back to where it began. Link\u2019s thrusters will fire to boost Swift slowly, so there\u2019s no heavy jostling.<\/p>\n
Katalyst threw the mission together in just nine months. NASA insisted on a rush job because the telescope will be too low to recover by the fall. Without a boost, it\u2019s predicted to plunge to its demise in October.<\/p>\n
Bad weather and technical issues caused a series of last-minute launch delays.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is a high-risk, high-reward mission,\u201d Katalyst Space Chief Executive Ghonhee Lee said ahead of liftoff. \u201cThe biggest danger was always, we don\u2019t launch anything and we let Swift burn up in the atmosphere. So we were always trying to avoid that risk, and our team has done that.\u201d <\/p>\n
Dunn writes for the Associated Press. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.\u00a0\u2014\u00a0A three-armed spacecraft rocketed into orbit Friday to rescue a NASA telescope that\u2019s in danger of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":516340,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[67428,84729,74688,1744,85,46,29576,172386,231581,144265,31528,1261,122689,30478,239591,21820,141,2058],"class_list":["post-523864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-altitude","tag-bad-weather","tag-danger","tag-earth","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-katalyst","tag-katalyst-space-technologies","tag-link-spacecraft","tag-mile","tag-mission","tag-month","tag-nasa-telescope","tag-observation","tag-orbit-friday","tag-rescue-mission","tag-science","tag-swift"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/516340"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}