The Silicon Graybeard

In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.

Friday, August 7, 2026

Update on efforts to rescue the Swift rescue mission

The last update I saw and posted was this past Monday, Aug. 3, and I wasn't really expecting an update today, but just ran across it. This was linked from NASA Science's page, but that article isn't complete. Space.com has a good report if any of this post makes you say, "whut? WTF are you talking about?"

It's a progress report. The mission isn't back to the expected conditions, but it's much improved and looking like it could be possible for the mission to meet its objectives.

LINK originally was in a multi-axis spin rotating at about 9 degrees per second, which resulted in sporadic communications and impeded LINK’s progress toward Swift. Using a series of burns from one of LINK’s electric propulsion thrusters, the Katalyst team now has slowed that spin to about 1.47 degrees per second. Katalyst plans to keep LINK at that spin rate as it proceeds with next steps for the mission. This includes uploading a flight software update in the coming days with new attitude controllers designed to maintain LINK’s stability in its current configuration. These updates would allow LINK to begin maneuvering to align with Swift’s orbit.

Artist's illustration of Katalyst Space Technologies' LINK spacecraft (left) meeting up with NASA's Swift space telescope in Earth orbit. (Image credit: NASA)

As a reminder, the Katalyst LINK mission launched on July 3rd on a mission remarkable in many ways. It's a mission that has never been tried before: the LINK satellite will rendezvous with Swift, attach itself with robotic arms, and boost Swift's orbit back up. For a mission that has never been tried, add to the picture that they were working to an absurdly short schedule compared to virtually all NASA missions. NASA estimates they need to boost Swift before its orbit decays to lower than 186 miles, and further estimate that will happen "by October." They don't provide any input on October 1st vs. the 31st.

The software updates mentioned above are scheduled to be beamed up to LINK "in the coming days," according to NASA.