NASA Launches Spacecraft to Recover Sinking Telescope

TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - A recovery mission to rescue NASA's telescope Swift Observatory launched on Friday, with a three-armed spacecraft successfully rocketing into orbit from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

As DW reported, the Swift telescope satellite is 1.6 tons (1.4 metric tons) and circling 224 miles (360 kilometers) above Earth.

U.S. defense contractor Northrop Grumman launched Katalyst Space Technologies' three-armed Link spacecraft to do the job of reaching and capturing Swift in roughly a month.

"This is a high-risk, high-reward mission," Katalyst Space CEO Ghonhee Lee said ahead of liftoff. 

"The biggest danger was always we don't 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," Lee added.

Katalyst's Link spacecraft was launched by a small rocket named Pegasus, which was launched from an airplane.

What happened to Swift?

The Swift telescope was launched in 2004 and since then, it has been tracking some of the biggest explosions in the universe, including gamma-ray bursts and exploding stars.

But the aging structure has been affected by recent solar storms and is sinking faster than ever, heading toward Earth.

NASA has paid $30 million to Katalyst in an attempt to capture the telescope and boost its orbit.

If the Link spacecraft is successful, Swift could return to work by September.

To do so, the Link spacecraft must raise the telescope's altitude by 150 miles using its thrusters to boost Swift slowly, without heavy jostling.

A time-sensitive mission

NASA warned that the telescope would sink too low to recover by autumn of this year, and predicted it would plunge to its demise in October if it remained unaided.

Katalyst managed to organize the mission in just nine months, but bad weather and technical issues caused a series of last-minute launch delays.

"This is a lot of firsts stacked on top of each other," Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's astrophysics division, told reporters days before the launch. "I'm just deeply thankful that we're even giving this a go."

Read: NASA Plans 4 New Moon Missions With 3 Private Companies

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