NASA Is Taking Suggestions For Raising Swift’s Orbit

Launched in 2004, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory – formerly the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Explorer – has been dutifully studying gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) during its two-year mission, before moving on to a more general space observation role during its ongoing mission. Unfortunately, the observatory is in LEO, at an altitude of around 370 km. The natural orbital decay combined with increased solar activity now threatens to end Swift’s mission, unless NASA can find someone who can boost its orbit.

Using Swift as a testbed for commercial orbit-boosting technologies, NASA is working with a number of companies to investigate options. One of these is the SSPICY demonstration of in-orbit inspection technology by Starfish Space that’s part of an existing Phase III program.

Although currently no option has been selected and Swift is still at risk of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere within the near future, there seems to be at least a glimmer of hope that this process can be reverted, and a perfectly fine triple-telescope space observatory can keep doing science for many years to come. Along the way it may also provide a blueprint for how to do the same with other LEO assets that are at risk of meeting a fiery demise.

23 thoughts on “NASA Is Taking Suggestions For Raising Swift’s Orbit

    1. Nah, that’s silly. The steel cable may rust and is much too heavy! Think of the pyhsiks!

      But how’s this – they could just send up a balloon with a rope and a big magnet attached to it?
      – It’ll float up until just under the dome.

      On a second thought, it might be problematic if the telescope suddely hangs up side-down or sidewise,
      due to the magnet self-attaching at wrong side.

    1. I wonder how much boost could realistically be achieved if they painted one half of every satellite black and the other half silvered, and used the reaction wheels to make one side face the sun on one half of the orbit and then spin it around on the other half, so they’d get an asymmetric boost from radiation pressure. Probably not enough to defeat atmospheric drag.

      1. You have invented the world’s most terrible solar sail. Realistically, this kind approach (with different paints) has in practice only been useful for controlling which way a satellite is pointing.

        1. Yes, quite terrible… But it’s something which might already exist on hardware that is quite difficult to access, depending on the paint job ;)

          A lot of space heroics in the past have famously consisted of coming up with a not-ideal kludge which only uses the stuff you have up there. But I don’t think they’d be able to boost it enough, I’m just curious about how far from enough it would be, and I might do some back-of-the-envelope figures another day… but right now I can’t be bothered, so I thought I’d tempt some other reader to do it for me.

  1. I thought NASA is taking suggestions how to replace the useless management fat with thousands of engineers, but I am wrong again. They want us, volunteers, to do the job of fired engineers instead.

      1. That’s easy: train a model on the existing images from the telescope and you don’t need the telescope any more you can just let the AI generate the images.

        As a bonus, the telescope will be boosted so far by the AI hype bubble that it’ll probably end up orbiting Uranus…

    1. Every institution is like 80% administration now, it’s insane. The managerial revolution theory was obviously correct and incredibly ahead of its time. Was at NASA recently and the surge of early retirements was depressing. Engineers that probably have knowledge and capabilities which won’t be replaced or transmitted into the future.

  2. Elon should have thought about this when he launched is Roadster, and gotten more than a laugh out of the event. I’m sure he could have dreamt up a way to put some small thrusters on the car, and a literal Nerf (not nerf) bar on the front . . . . :D

  3. It seems some folks in the comments have been misled by the HaD article title.

    NASA is not asking John Q. Public how to boost a satellite orbit. They know how to do that.

    From the press release linked, NASA has already awarded two companies a contract to provide a proposal from that company for a spacecraft to boost the orbit of the satellite, and is also evaluating an existing company’s proposal which was originally for a different use case. That’s it.

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