Nasa abandons Swift telescope rescue mission as spacecraft spins out of control

Katalyst Space and Nasa jointly abandoned the Swift observatory rescue attempt on Wednesday after engineers exhausted all options to stabilize a spinning spacecraft that was supposed to extend the telescope's life by several years.

The Link craft, launched in early July to rendezvous with Swift at 347 kilometers above Earth, lost attitude control shortly after reaching orbit and began rotating uncontrollably. Engineers spent weeks attempting to arrest the malfunction, including uploading revised positioning software last week that reduced but could not eliminate the unwanted spin.

"Following continued monitoring and assessment of the Link spacecraft, Katalyst Space and Nasa together have concluded that due to ongoing attitude control issues, the mission will not include the capture and boost of Nasa's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory," the partners said in their Wednesday statement.

Telescope faces atmospheric re-entry

The mission had aimed to grapple Swift and raise it from its current 347-kilometer orbit to approximately 600 kilometers, buying the observatory years of additional operational life. Without that orbital boost, the $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory—which has tracked gamma-ray bursts and other cosmic phenomena since 2004—is now expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere and burn up later this year.

The observatory's name honors the late Nasa astrophysicist Neil Gehrels, and its two-decade mission has provided crucial data on some of the universe's most violent events. The failed rescue represents both a technical setback for commercial space servicing and the likely end of one of Nasa's longest-running space-based astronomy platforms.

Source: South China Morning Post