Commercial Robot Launched to Raise Orbit of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory

A commercial robotic satellite launched Friday to capture and raise the orbit of NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, which faces reentry this fall without intervention. Cnn reported the Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket lifted off at 4:36 a.m. ET after weather delays and a software issue that scrubbed a Thursday attempt.

The rocket was dropped from the Stargazer L-1011 aircraft at 40,000 feet above the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies built the 880-pound LINK spacecraft under a September contract that gave the company nine months to design, build, test and launch the vehicle. LINK carries three robotic arms, 20 feet of solar panels and three ion thrusters.

After several weeks of navigation tests, it will survey the 3,200-pound Swift observatory to identify safe grappling points before firing its thrusters to lift the telescope from roughly 185 miles to 370 miles altitude over two to three months. Swift has operated since its 2004 launch and has detected more than 2,000 gamma-ray bursts while studying cosmic objects across visible, ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma-ray wavelengths.

Recent solar maximum activity expanded Earth’s atmosphere and accelerated orbital decay.

The Swift team at Penn State already reduced power and oriented the spacecraft to minimize drag. NASA selected the mission to preserve Swift’s rapid-response capabilities rather than establish a general policy of boosting every satellite. “We didn’t want to set the precedent that anything that comes out of orbit has to be boosted, but this was not just any spacecraft,” division director Shawn Domagal-Goldman said June 17.