NASA-Funded Mission to Rescue a Falling Space Telescope Officially Ends in Failure

In early July, NASA launched a rushed first-of-its-kind rescue mission to save a decades-old space observatory that was falling from its orbit. As of August 19, however, the agency is calling it quits. The mission failed “due to an ongoing commercial spacecraft attitude control issue,” according to a statement.

Experts predict that its target—NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory—will probably re-enter Earth’s atmosphere and burn up later this year. Swift launched in November 2004 for a two-year mission to study gamma-ray bursts, the most powerful explosions in the universe, which are often associated with the collapse of massive stars or the birth of black holes. It has far exceeded expectations.

Over the past 21 years, it has observed around 2,000 of these high-energy bursts. Swift also captured data on other astronomical objects and events with its three telescopes that see in visible, ultraviolet, X-ray and gamma-ray wavelengths of light. Fun fact: Swift’s most distant gamma-ray burst On April 29, 2009, the observatory witnessed a gamma-ray burst that took 13 billion years to reach Earth.

That means the event that produced the energetic explosion happened in the early universe, since the Big Bang occurred around 13.8 billion years ago. But recently, NASA realized that the spacecraft was falling from its orbit faster than predicted because of unexpectedly strong solar activity in late 2024 as the sun reached the peak of its 11-year cycle. Intense solar flares caused a series of reactions that ultimately resulted in more atmospheric drag on Earth’s satellites, reported the New York Times’ Kenneth Chang in late July.

That put a “hard deadline” on any attempt to save Swift, writes Scientific American’s Adam Kovac. In September 2025, NASA awarded a $30 million contract to Arizona-based company Katalyst Space Technologies to build a spacecraft for a rescue mission. The company constructed one called Lightweight In-Space Navigation and Kinematics (LINK) in nine months.

But the rush job meant it wasn’t tested and scrutinized as much as those in other NASA missions, per the Times. In what sounds like a scene straight out of a science fiction movie, LINK was supposed to use its robotic arms to grab Swift and physically push it into a higher orbit to extend its life. If the mission was successful, the observatory potentially could have continued operations into the 2030s.