NASA Plans to Rescue Swift Observatory Satellite from Earth's Atmosphere Fails, Lunar Crاش
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Plans to rescue NASA’s Swift Observatory satellite from falling into Earth’s atmosphere are seemingly dead in the water. The agency and Katalyst Space announced yesterday that the Link spacecraft will no longer capture or boost the Swift telescope to a higher altitude due to an ongoing “attitude control issue,” but will instead conduct rendezvous and proximity operations to collect data for future space exploration.
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EngadgetThe Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is expected to re-enter and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere later this year, after NASA has aborted the mission meant to tug it back up to a higher orbit. NASA has announced that Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft will no longer dock with the satellite and boost it to a higher altitude as planned. The agency blamed it on LINK's ongoing attitude control issue, which started in late July.
Ars TechnicaKatalyst, the startup leading the Swift rescue effort, said Wednesday that “ongoing attitude control issues” will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link’s remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite’s close-in navigation system.
GizmodoNASA may have given up on its attempt to rescue Swift, but the agency will still use the LINK spacecraft to inform future servicing missions. “LINK still will attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to demonstrate key capabilities for the future of space exploration,” the agency wrote.
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They were taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. In the early hours of August 5, the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket crashed into the lunar surface. Now, NASA has released a series of images captured by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) from August 11 to 12, showing a new crater on the moon caused by the wandering rocket.
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GizmodoThe Falcon 9 rocket crashed into the lunar surface after being stranded in a highly elliptical orbit, and NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) captured a series of images of a new crater that formed from the impact.
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The rocket was roughly 39 feet (12 meters) long, 13 feet (4 meters) wide, and weighed about 8,800 pounds (4,000 kilograms). Astronomers first calculated the rocket’s trajectory using publicly available data, after which NASA used its Center for Near Earth Object Studies to refine the trajectory and identify the location of the impact.
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EngadgetIndependent astronomer Bill Grey first drew attention to a rocket on a collision course with the Moon in April. He used orbit-computing software to figure out where and when the rocket was crashing. Grey and his colleagues also used a physics simulator to analyze the data, predicting that the upper stage wouldn't make much of an impact. The rocket was 39 feet long and 13 feet wide, weighing around 4,000 kilograms. It slammed into the Moon at 5,400 mph and, based on NASA's calculations, created a crater 60 feet wide and 12 feet deep.
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Fresh scar To capture the new images, NASA engineers tilted the spacecraft so its cameras would point toward the crater each time LRO passed above the Moon at a distance of around 60 miles (96 kilometers). Using a variety of viewing angles, scientists could see the crater under several lighting conditions to show its unique features.
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EngadgetTo capture the images, NASA engineers had to tilt the spacecraft sideways so its cameras would point downward as it passed 60 miles above the crater. Specifically, they used LRO's Narrow-Angle Camera, which can see features on the lunar surface as small as three feet wide.
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Meanwhile, the photos above show the crash site from different angles. The darker streak radiating out of the crater is made of older materials from near the surface: Dust and rocks whose colors and components have already been altered by years of exposure to solar winds and cosmic rays. The lighter materials near the rim came from deeper underground.
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GizmodoLRO used its Narrow-Angle Camera to capture the crater in detail, revealing dark and bright rays emanating from the crash site. The brighter rays and splotch above the crater is fresher material that was excavated from deeper below the surface.
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LRO circles the Moon from pole to pole every two hours as Earth’s natural satellite rotates underneath it. The spacecraft must wait until a specific spot turns into view to capture a photograph, which took six days in this case. If LRO’s camera was even 10 seconds off, the targeted area would have drifted off-center by 10 miles (16 kilometers).
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EngadgetIt wasn't an easy feat, as the spacecraft flew from pole to pole every two hours at a speed of 1 mile per second, while the Moon rotated on its axis underneath. NASA had to wait for the LRO and the crash site to align, and that took six days. The agency did, however, release before-and-after photos, which you can see on the official site.
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“We knew this was a high-risk, high-reward mission – a first-of-its kind attempt, developed on an unprecedented timeline driven by the Sun’s activity,” said NASA astrophysics director Shawn Domagal-Goldman. “We were all hoping for more science from Swift. But we knew the takeaways from this mission would be worthwhile either way, and we have gained so much through the series of accomplishments up to this point.”
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EngadgetKatalyst had less than a year to design a spacecraft for the Swift Boost mission, which launched in early July. Shawn Domagal-Goldman, the Astrophysics Division director at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said it was a "high-risk, high-reward mission" mission from the start. It was a first-of-its-kind attempt, and the team had very little time to try and rescue the Swift telescope, whose orbit is rapidly decaying due to an increase in solar activity in recent years.
4 details only one outlet reported
Independent claims that didn't surface elsewhere in our corpus. Treat as supplementary — not corroborated across outlets.
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01 Gizmodo NASA has reluctantly called off a mission designed to nudge one of its telescopes to a higher orbit after a private rescue spacecraft failed to shake off an issue with its attitude control.
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02 TechCrunch Elon Musk’s SpaceX attempted to acquire AI coding startup Cognition as it works to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the AI race, Bloomberg reported Wedesday, citing sources familiar with the matter.
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03 Ars Technica “While the mission will not have the ending we originally intended, NASA and Katalyst are assessing what milestones remain ahead,” Katalyst said in a statement. “We will continue working to extract technical and operational value from the spacecraft.”
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04 MIT Technology Review When the four astronauts on board NASA’s Artemis II swung around the moon earlier this year, they set a new record for the farthest humans have ever ventured from Earth, surpassing the distance set by Apollo 13 in 1972 by some 4,000 miles.
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Sources (6)
- verge
- techcrunch
- gizmodo
- mittech
- arstechnica
- engadget