NASA Revives Two Instruments on Doomed Swift Telescope After Rescue Mission Fails

NASA has restarted two of the three science instruments aboard its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, restoring limited gamma-ray-burst-hunting capability to a spacecraft the agency now expects to fall out of orbit within the next few months. The reactivation, confirmed in an August 28 update from the Swift mission team, follows the collapse of an ambitious commercial effort to grapple the aging telescope and push it into a higher, longer-lived orbit.

The rescue spacecraft, named LINK and built by the Arizona-based startup Katalyst Space Technologies, launched in July on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus rocket with a mandate to become the first commercial vehicle to dock with a government satellite never designed for on-orbit servicing. Three weeks in, it began spinning uncontrollably. Engineers spent most of August trying to recover it, and on August 19 NASA and Katalyst announced that LINK would not attempt to capture or boost Swift after all. The mission's remaining goal is now a lower-stakes rendezvous and proximity-operations demonstration rather than an actual rescue.

The numbers

Swift launched in 2004 on what was meant to be a two-year mission; it has instead operated for 22 years, more than ten times its design life. Rising solar activity this cycle has puffed up the upper atmosphere, increasing drag on low-orbiting satellites and pulling Swift down faster than engineers had planned for. NASA switched off two of Swift's instruments in February to reduce drag and buy time for the boost attempt; those two — the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope and the X-ray Telescope — came back online on August 26. The third, the Burst Alert Telescope, remains off but is expected to resume data collection within weeks, according to the mission blog.

NASA now projects Swift will descend below roughly 185 miles (300 kilometers) within one to two months of the August 28 update, the altitude at which atmospheric drag accelerates sharply and an observatory typically loses the ability to hold a stable pointing attitude. Officials have said uncontrolled reentry is expected no earlier than October, with most of the roughly 3,000-pound spacecraft expected to burn up in the atmosphere and the risk to anyone on the ground assessed as low. The Katalyst rescue attempt itself was reported by NASA and industry outlets to have cost on the order of $30 million.

How Swift got here

Named for astrophysicist Neil Gehrels, the observatory was built to catch gamma-ray bursts — the brief, extraordinarily energetic flashes produced when massive stars collapse or neutron stars merge — and to swivel its other telescopes onto the burst location within seconds, before the afterglow fades. It has logged more than 1,600 bursts over two decades, including the 2022 event known as the "BOAT," the brightest gamma-ray burst ever recorded. Detailed background on the observatory's instruments and mission history is maintained by the Swift science team at Goddard Space Flight Center.

By the mid-2020s, atmospheric drag had eroded Swift's orbit enough that NASA began looking for a way to extend its life rather than let it reenter. In September 2025 the agency contracted with Katalyst Space Technologies for a first-of-its-kind commercial servicing mission: send a small robotic spacecraft to rendezvous with Swift, grapple it — despite the telescope having no docking hardware — and fire thrusters to lift it to a more stable altitude. Katalyst's own mission page for LINK describes the spacecraft's intended servicing and proximity-operations capabilities. The plan was, by NASA's own description, high-risk: no company had ever attempted to capture and boost a satellite not built for the purpose, on a timeline compressed by the sun's own activity cycle.

LINK reached orbit in July and began approaching Swift. According to mission updates, an attitude-control fault put the spacecraft into a multi-axis spin in late July that disrupted its communications and burned through propellant reserves far faster than planned. A flight-software patch uploaded August 11 damped the spin, but engineers were never able to restore the pointing stability the capture-and-boost maneuver required, leading to the August 19 decision to abandon that objective.

Who is affected

Swift's shutdown and now-limited restart affects the community of astronomers who use it as a rapid-response instrument. Because gamma-ray bursts and other transient events — supernovae, flares from black holes, the electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational-wave detections — must be caught quickly or not at all, Swift has functioned for two decades as a kind of always-on alarm system that other telescopes, on the ground and in orbit, rely on for coordinates and rapid classification. With the Burst Alert Telescope still offline, Swift currently cannot perform that triggering role; it can still point its restored ultraviolet, optical and X-ray instruments at targets identified by other means. Once the observatory reenters, that early-warning function will fall more heavily on other missions until a successor is available.

"This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said of the decision to abandon the boost attempt.

Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA's Astrophysics Division, framed the effort in similar terms, saying the agency "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," and that "we were all hoping for more science from Swift, but we knew the takeaways from this mission would be worthwhile either way."

What happens next

NASA's near-term plan is to keep collecting what science it can from Swift's two active instruments while continuing to work toward restoring the Burst Alert Telescope, according to the mission team. The agency and Katalyst are separately continuing LINK's rendezvous and proximity-operations tests near Swift, data NASA says will still inform future in-space servicing missions even though the boost objective was dropped. Tracking teams will refine the reentry forecast as Swift's orbit continues to decay; NASA has said it does not expect to be able to predict the reentry time and location precisely until close to the event itself, a limitation typical of uncontrolled reentries of objects this size. The agency has said the risk of debris reaching populated areas is low, consistent with its assessments of past uncontrolled reentries of comparably sized spacecraft.