{"id":2428,"date":"2026-08-03T03:27:16","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T03:27:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/?p=2428"},"modified":"2026-08-03T03:27:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T03:27:16","slug":"heres-how-engineers-plan-to-save-the-satellite-sent-to-save-nasas-swift-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/?p=2428","title":{"rendered":"Here&#039;s how engineers plan to save the satellite sent to save NASA&#039;s Swift mission"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA&#8217;s $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory <a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/space\/2026\/07\/reaction-wheel-failures-leave-swift-rescue-mission-spinning-in-orbit\/\">suddenly spun out of control<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>It didn&#8217;t look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with the ground and complicating efforts to arrest the spin. Two of the satellite&#8217;s three reaction wheels, used for pointing, also stopped working. Through sporadic radio contact, engineers discovered a problem with some of the spacecraft&#8217;s cold gas thrusters used for finer attitude control.<\/p>\n<p>The Link satellite is built, owned, and operated by Katalyst Space Technologies, a satellite servicing startup that won a $30 million contract from NASA to fly up to the Swift observatory, grab onto it, and boost its orbit before succumbing to aerodynamic drag and burning up int he atmosphere.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/space\/2026\/08\/heres-how-engineers-plan-to-save-the-satellite-sent-to-save-nasas-swift-mission\/\">Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/space\/2026\/08\/heres-how-engineers-plan-to-save-the-satellite-sent-to-save-nasas-swift-mission\/#comments\">Comments<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Source: <a href='https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/space\/2026\/08\/heres-how-engineers-plan-to-save-the-satellite-sent-to-save-nasas-swift-mission\/' target='_blank'>Read the original article on arstechnica.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA&#8217;s $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of control. It didn&#8217;t look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2429,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2428","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-important","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2428"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2428\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2428"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2428"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/futureknowledge.in\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2428"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}