During the fierce solar storms of 2024, people in places far south — places where no one expected to see auroras — snapped photos of luminous green and purple light rippling in the sky.

For the masses, they were breathtaking and magical. But inside flight control for NASA's Swift mission, seeing those images was devastating: The flaring sun was only driving a nail deeper into the spacecraft's coffin. As Earth's upper atmosphere heated and bloated, the thickened air tugged on the space telescope. 

The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a telescope that has watched the universe's brightest explosions since 2004, is sinking — and fast. Instead of continuing its scientific observations into the 2030s, as once estimated, it now looks destined to fall back to Earth later this year, doomed for incineration in the atmosphere.

"To be totally honest, the idea of boosting it had occurred to us, but it seemed sufficiently far-fetched that I did not think there was any reasonable likelihood that NASA would go along with this," Brad Cenko, the mission's principal investigator, told Mashable.

But NASA will indeed go for it, full throttle. About nine months ago, the agency hired a contractor, Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies, to quickly throw together a rescue mission. The company's spacecraft, called LINK, will fly up, wrap its arms around the telescope, and tow it about 150 miles up into a safer orbit. That robotic mission — planned on an unseemly timeline by NASA standards — is expected to launch on a Pegasus rocket that will drop from a Northrop Grumman aircraft over the South Pacific, then ignite. If the weather and environmental conditions are good, they'll launch on June 27.

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NASA has serviced the Hubble Space Telescope before with astronauts, but the Swift boosting mission is wholly different. For the first time, NASA will try to save a science mission that was never intended for repairs in space. If it works, the robotic mission could signal the end of a throwaway culture for spacecraft in favor of a new era committed to fixing and reusing. 

NASA is paying a little over $30 million for the capture, boost, and release of Swift — a fraction of the original $160 million mission that launched in 2004. That's an economical choice, Cenko said, especially when considering that building another telescope today would likely cost in the $250 to $300 million range due to inflation. 

Katalyst Space Technologies had less than nine months to plan the boosting mission. Credit: NASA / Katalyst Space Technologies infographic

Why astronomers love Swift

Astronomers say Swift, one of the few NASA mission names that isn't straining to be an acronym, has earned a second chance. The observatory hunts gamma‑ray bursts, brief flashes of high‑energy light that can outshine entire galaxies for a few seconds. In that blink of time, a single event can pour out more energy than our sun will emit over its whole lifetime. 

Sitting a few hundred miles above Earth in low orbit, Swift constantly scans a wide patch of sky for these bursts. When it spots one, the spacecraft whips around and points its X‑ray and ultraviolet instruments at the fading glow. That ability to react within a minute or two to "catch the act" is how it got its name.

In its first decade, Swift mainly chased its own discoveries. More recently, the team has figured out how to feed it alerts from other observatories, including big sky surveys scanned from the ground. That has turned Swift into a kind of first responder for cosmic fireworks, swinging toward whatever the rest of astronomy flags as urgent.

Despite its value to astronomers, the driving force behind the boosting mission isn't entirely about preserving the scientific capability.

"If that were the only story, I'm not 100 percent sure we would be here," Cenko said. "The current administration is very strongly motivated to develop the U.S. commercial space sector, and to ensure that we maintain dominance in that space sector compared to other countries."

The autonomous robotic LINK spacecraft, built by Katalyst Space Technologies, will try to rendezvous with the Swift observatory. Credit: NASA / Sophia Roberts

Why Swift needs rescuing

The problem is not Swift's cameras or detectors. Those are in great working order, though they were only intended to operate for two years. It is the invisible drag of Earth's upper atmosphere that has created a ticking clock for the mission.

When NASA launched Swift in 2004, it flew about 370 miles above the planet. Even there, a very thin smear of air acts like a brake. Over time, that drag steals speed and lets gravity pull a spacecraft down. Today, Swift has an altitude of roughly 230 miles.

To buy extra time, the team changed how Swift flew in February, angling it to reduce drag. Then in April, they turned off the wide-angle detector that first spots gamma‑ray bursts. While those steps should slow down its fall, they've also essentially suspended the telescope's work.

Already researchers have logged dozens of missed opportunities, including exploding stars, black holes tearing apart nearby stars, flares from black holes in the Milky Way, and comets changing as they move through the inner solar system. 

"Everyone wants to be able to go and save this telescope," Kieran Wilson, Katalyst's principal investigator for the LINK spacecraft, told Mashable. "It's not something where people are like, 'Oh, well, maybe we could slip launch a couple months.' It just doesn't come up. Everyone understands the constraints, understands the hard physics of the problem, and has been really, really motivated."

How LINK will boost Swift's orbit

Nothing about the boosting mission is "normal." First, the rescue spacecraft, LINK, will drop from an airplane and light its engines midair over the ocean near the Marshall Islands. That unusual launch profile should make it easier to reach Swift's path near Earth's equator. 

Once in orbit, LINK, short for Lightweight In-space Navigation and Kinematics, will take its time closing in. The spacecraft will spend days or weeks gently adjusting its path until it flies close to Swift at nearly the same speed. Then, it will begin snapping detailed pictures of the sinking spacecraft.

What Swift looks like today is one of the biggest unknowns for the rescue operation. Its insulation has likely degraded quite a bit over the past two decades in space. Katalyst's flight team can't predict its condition, nor do they know if sturdy spots exist on the spacecraft's body to get a good grip.

When LINK does move in for the capture, people on the ground won't be steering it like a drone. Both spacecraft will be racing around Earth at about 17,000 mph. That means radio signals wouldn't be quick enough for the job. Instead, LINK will have to behave a bit like a self‑driving car. It will take rapid‑fire images, compare what it sees to its internal model of Swift, and fire small thrusters to correct its path by inches at a time.

In the last moments, three metal arms with clamps will unfold from LINK. Swift will then hand over control of its orientation to Katalyst's robot. The climb to a higher orbit could take from about a month to several months, depending on Swift's altitude when LINK grabs it, the sun's behavior, and how well the engines work.

This Northrop Grumman aircraft carries a Pegasus rocket, seen below the plane, that will drop over an ocean, light its engines midair, and launch to space. Credit: Northrop Grumman

Robots as space mechanics

If Katalyst succeeds, it will show that a relatively small robot can extend the life of a much more expensive telescope, even one that engineers never designed for maintenance. Future NASA missions might include grab handles, standard attachment rings, and replaceable parts, designed with the idea that a space mechanic could show up someday. It could mean a new era in the space economy, Wilson said.

"This is absolutely a model we want to use going forward, where spacecraft are no longer a static asset on orbit — they're no longer stuck with only what they launched with," Wilson said. "You can reposition spacecraft when they run out of propellant, boost their orbit when they're in danger of reentry, and that is something that we see as foundational to the way that space will evolve in the next few decades."

For the Swift team, the mission is more than an experiment or a demonstration. They consider themselves Swifties and have leaned into Taylor Swift fandom, swapping friendship bracelets at meetings and borrowing language from the pop star's albums. 

They're hoping it's not the end of a good 20 years, full of astronomical hits. 

"We say we're going into the 'boost era'," Cenko said.