Katalyst’s Link rescue spacecraft installed on Pegasus rocket
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Katalyst’s proposed Swift rescue mission.
Click for original image.
Katalyst’s Link rescue spacecraft that is going to try to raise the orbit of the Swift-Gehrels Space Telescope before it decays has now been installed on Northrop Grumman’s last Pegasus rocket, in preparation for a launch hopefully before the end of this month.
Engineers completed installation of Katalyst Space’s LINK robotic servicing spacecraft into a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket on Tuesday, June 9, at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Launch is anticipated later this month.
NASA contracted Katalyst to build and launch LINK to raise the altitude of the agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory. Our planet’s atmosphere creates drag for spacecraft in low Earth orbit, gradually reducing their altitudes if they don’t have propulsion systems to counteract the effect. Recent solar activity magnified this effect on Swift, and its orbit decayed faster than anticipated.
This mission is one of the most daring ever financed by NASA and attempted by a private company. First, Gehrel-Swift has no attachment points. To grab it and then raise its orbit requires the robotic tentacles shown in the graphic to the right. Such a robotic grab in orbit has never been done before.
Second, Katalyst is a satellite servicing startup that has not yet serviced anything in orbit. The Link spacecraft was originally intended as a demo mission. When NASA put out a call for rescue proposals, the company decided to revise it to save Gehrels-Swift, because doing so was fast and made a rescue possible.
If Katalyst succeeds in this mission it will immediately leap to the top of the orbital servicing heap. Expect investment capital to quickly pour in afterward. And even if the mission fails but gets close, the company might still get a lot of investment capital, simply because it got so close.
Finally, this will be the final launch of the Pegasus rocket. After this flight Northrop Grumman has no more in stock, and it will retire it and its Stargazer L-1011 airplane that is used as its first stage.
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I believe the Stargazer L-1011 is the last L-1011 flying.
If this succeeds, perhaps the powers that be will enable a Hubble Space Telescope repair and upgrade. During one of the Space Shuttle missions to upgrade Hubble, it was so impressive the way the original design enabled more efficient upgrading. Yes, yes, space is way dangerous, but when they worked on Hubble, some of it was opening the side panel, removing it large black box, and replacing it with another, new black box
This modular design of refrigerator sized containers. Inside the boxes are the instruments, gyros, etc.
In fact, during the 1999 servicing mission, the original reel-to-reel data tape recorders were pulled out and replaced with modern Solid State.
So I guess the only functioning data tape machines in space are the Voyager spacecraft.
Imagine what today’s technology could do to upgrade Hubble. And soon, the last two gyros will fail.
Yes, yes, there are and will be, better space telescopes. Hubble could also continue to provide us with amazing images and information.