Overview
- NASA and Katalyst announced on Wednesday, August 19 that they will not attempt the planned capture-and-boost after the LINK servicer proved unreliable for a safe rendezvous and grapple.
- LINK suffered repeated attitude-control problems, including a multi-day uncontrolled spin, intermittent communications, two failed reaction wheels and degraded cold-gas thruster performance, which made a delicate capture maneuver unsafe.
- LINK was developed under a rapid roughly $30 million contract and launched on July 3 aboard a Pegasus XL; engineers partially restored control with software updates in August but judged the system still too unreliable for the boost.
- With the capture canceled, NASA says the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory will probably reenter and mostly disintegrate before year-end and that any debris risk is confined to a roughly ±20.6° latitude band because of Swift’s orbital inclination.
- LINK will remain in proximity to Swift as an experimental demonstration to gather engineering data and procedures that could shape future on-orbit servicing, and NASA will shift science coverage to other observatories after the likely loss of Swift.