Overview
- NASA and Katalyst announced Wednesday that the LINK rescue vehicle will not capture or boost the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.
- Katalyst said the mission suffered persistent attitude-control failures, including about 72 hours of uncontrolled tumbling and intermittent loss of communications, that prevented a safe rendezvous.
- As a result, NASA now expects the 2004-launched Swift telescope to reenter and largely burn up in Earth's atmosphere later this year.
- LINK will remain near Swift to perform non-rescue demonstrations and to collect operational data and procedures meant to inform future on-orbit servicing missions.
- The $30 million experiment, launched on July 3 on a Pegasus rocket, highlighted the technical difficulty of rapid, low-cost satellite maintenance and raises questions about protecting aging science assets and gaps in high-energy sky monitoring.