NASA’s Swift Observatory Telescope Doomed for Destruction

Kenneth Chang has the bad news at The New York Times (Gift Link): NASA’s high-risk, high-reward attempt to save one of its space telescopes before it falls out of orbit has failed. On Wednesday, NASA announced that a rescue spacecraft that was meant to grab onto the space agency’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory and push it into a higher altitude will not proceed. With the rescue mission called off, Swift, which has observed distant, powerful explosions in the cosmos since 2004, is expected to burn up in the atmosphere later this year. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting,” Jared Isaacman, the NASA administrator, said in a news release. That rescue attempt was an uncrewed spacecraft built by Arizona-based Katalyst Space Technologies that would have pushed the telescope 100 miles further into space, giving it another decade of service.