NASA’s Swift gamma-ray telescope could find new life
A robotic tugboat is launched to bring a decades-old space telescope to safety. On July 2, a private spacecraft called LINK will launch to save NASA’s Swift space telescope from a fiery death in Earth’s atmosphere.
The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory was launched in 2004 to study gamma-ray bursts and other cosmic events. He has enjoyed enormous success and continues to make new discoveries.
But all satellites eventually succumb to gravity, and most burn in Earth’s atmosphere before they reach the ground. In early 2025, NASA scientists realized that Swift was losing altitude faster than expected: Strong solar activity from 2024 had given Earth’s atmosphere a boost of energy, expanding it slightly and exerting more drag on objects in low orbit. The extra drag meant Swift would come home and break up in mid-2026 if nothing was done.
The scientists decided to mount a robotic rescue mission, something never done before. The idea was to launch a simple spacecraft that could grab Swift with robotic arms and pull it into a higher orbit. In September 2025, NASA selected the private American spaceflight company Katalyst to carry out the mission, giving it only nine months to prepare.
A rocket will launch LINK from the Marshall Islands at 5:09 a.m. EDT on July 2, after a two-day weather delay.
Operators will spend several weeks making sure LINK works. Then the spacecraft will spend about a month slowly approaching Swift and sending images back to Earth, where mission team members will choose the best spots to catch the descending spacecraft. Once LINK has Swift in its clutches, it will launch light thrusters to slowly raise the orbit over a few months, aiming for Swift’s initial altitude of around 600 kilometers.
If successful, similar techniques could boost other space telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope.
Swift occupies a unique niche in NASA’s pantheon of telescopes, says principal investigator Brad Cenko, an astrophysicist at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. True to its name, it can pivot quickly to track sudden cosmic explosions almost anywhere in the sky within minutes. Hubble, on the other hand, takes at least a day to repoint. “He’s truly NASA’s ‘first responder,’” Cenko said in an email.
Since December, Swift’s operational team has modified its observation strategy to reduce drag and slow its descent. Currently it does not take scientific data at all. Once in its new orbit, the observatory will need a reboot. Getting back to science could take another month or more, but when it does, Swift could still have a decade of observations ahead of him.
“Looking forward to our post-boost era, we’re really excited about all the discoveries Swift could unlock,” Cenko said.