Why NASA’s Mission to Rescue the Swift Observatory Ended in Failure

No more chances. NASA has announced that, after problems and a valiant effort to overcome them, it has ended the mission to save the Swift Observatory from burning up in the atmosphere. The team will perform a few of the initial parts of the mission—those they can, anyway—so they can collect at least some data to support future missions.

The overall rescue was always a long shot, so it’s not too surprising that things ended up this way. However, it’s worth looking at how we got here.

The Swift Observatory is a three-part orbital tool designed to study X-rays and gamma rays. It’s contributed to countless studies and produced many new insights; in fact, just yesterday, we published a story involving Swift as a primary platform for data collection.

Swift’s original orbit was around 600 kilometers above Earth’s surface, putting it at about the same altitude as Hubble, but with different orbital properties and without the option of servicing by the Space Shuttle. At that altitude, satellites are still enveloped in what’s called the thermosphere, a portion of the atmosphere so thin that its difference from a true vacuum is extremely minute.

The Swift Observatory will burn up over the course of the next few months.
Credit: Katalyst Space

And yet, the effect is not zero. Scientists estimated the atmospheric drag on Swift with extreme precision, and planned Swift’s lifetime accordingly. NASA knew that the observatory’s orbit would eventually decay, but they believed they had plenty of time to use it and potentially plan an orbital correction before that happened.

Unfortunately, the Sun had other ideas.

In late 2024 and early 2025, solar activity spiked higher than anticipated, with sunspot activity rising sharply. This increase in solar radiation heated Earth’s atmosphere, causing the gases to expand. This pushed more gas further out into space, thickening the thermosphere at Swift’s altitude.

As a result, Swift’s orbit began to decay more quickly than expected, and Katalyst saw its chance to act.

The company had already been working on its LINK spacecraft, designed to rendezvous with other spacecraft in orbit, dock with them, and provide some sort of assistance. That would usually come in the form of a boost to reposition the other satellite somewhere it could not reach on its own.

The LINK robotic servicing satellite awaits encapsulation inside its launch vehicle.
Credit: NASA

Though LINK was designed mostly for paid work with industry, Katalyst realized it was perfect for this job. Swift’s unforeseen problems provided a once-in-a-product-lifetime opportunity for Katalyst to prove its first flagship product, position itself as a premier private space company, and validate the concept of public-private partnerships in the first place.

Everything seemed to be going fairly well, until Link experienced a failure in two of its three reaction wheels, which control the spacecraft’s attitude. Link still had the extra boosters for Swift intact and ready to use, but the helper satellite could no longer be moved safely into position. Katalyst and NASA worked hard to try to fix the problem remotely, but this latest update finally ends the saga in failure.

NASA knew from the beginning that the mission had a real chance of failure, but the agency simply had no better option. The LINK rescue mission may have ended in defeat, but it was still worth the try. NASA and Katalyst also doubtless learned a lot about this type of mission, and about LINK specifically, which should at least contribute to more successful rescues in the future.