Nasa is racing to save an ageing telescope from falling back to Earth with a daring rescue mission.<\/p>\n
The US$30 million salvage operation gets under way as soon as this week with the planned launch of a robotic lifesaver.<\/p>\n
Nasa hired start-up Katalyst Space Technologies to boost the Swift Observatory to a higher orbit where it can continue hunting for some of the universe\u2019s biggest explosions. A three-armed spacecraft built by Katalyst will chase after Swift once it takes off from an atoll in the Pacific\u2019s Marshall Islands aboard a plane-launched Pegasus rocket. Lift-off could occur as early as Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Scanning the cosmos since its launch in 2004, Swift has been sinking faster and faster because of recent intense solar activity. It needs to get to a higher, more stable orbit as soon as possible to survive.<\/p>\n
Nasa\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope \u2013 also at risk \u2013 could be next.<\/p>\n
Like Swift, Hubble is losing altitude as the sun erupts with one flare after another. Katalyst Space CEO Ghonhee Lee said his company\u2019s next-generation robot, still in development, could save the day for the much bigger Hubble in a couple years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nasa is racing to save an ageing telescope from falling back to Earth with a daring rescue mission.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":732305,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,2724,144,315235,12654,58282,54914,88694,718,3,30241,315234,174082,315233,21,19,22,20,25,24,172462],"class_list":["post-732304","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-associated-press","tag-china","tag-ghonhee-lee","tag-hubble-space-telescope","tag-katalyst-space-technologies","tag-link","tag-marshall-islands","tag-nasa","tag-news","tag-nicky-fox","tag-pegasus-rocket","tag-roman-space-telescope","tag-swift-observatory","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-webb-space-telescope"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732304","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=732304"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/732304\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/732305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=732304"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=732304"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=732304"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}