Swift spacecraft reorientation buys time for reboost mission

WASHINGTON — NASA modified operations of an astrophysics spacecraft in a decaying orbit to buy more time for a mission later this year that will attempt to raise its orbit.

However, in a presentation to the National Academies' Committee on Astronomy and Astrophysics March 26, Kennea said updated models in January moved up the date when Swift would pass below 300 kilometers. There was now a 10% chance Swift would decay below 300 kilometers in late May, before the Katalyst mission would launch, and a 90% chance of doing so by mid-July.

At an astronomy conference in early January, Jamie Kennea, a research professor at Penn State University who is head of Swift's science operations team, said models projected that Swift's orbit would decay below 300 kilometers, the minimum altitude for the reboost mission, sometime between mid-October 2026 and January 2027. That provided several months of margin for Katalyst's Link spacecraft, scheduled to launch as soon as June 1 on a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL.