Weather and technical snags have forced Nasa and its partner space company Katalyst to indefinitely postpone a first-of-its-kind mission to tow an aging US satellite observatory into a safer orbit using a robot spacecraft, Nasa said yesterday.
The closely watched mission, organised on a short-notice production schedule of just nine months, would mark a key test of an orbital-grappling technology with major implications for both the commercial satellite industry and the US-China space race.
But the rare, airborne rocket launch designed to send the rescue spacecraft to orbit from a jetliner over the Pacific has been delayed repeatedly by weather and technical difficulties this week, leading the mission team to indefinitely postpone the flight.
According to Nasa, the latest unspecified issue was with the launch vehicle, a Pegasus XL rocket built by Northrop Grumman , which is supposed to carry Katalyst’s half-tonne spacecraft, called LINK, into low-earth orbit.
LINK was specially built to save the $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory by latching onto the crippled satellite and toting it to a higher, sustainable orbit, potentially extending its mission by years.
The observatory, also known as SWIFT, has no onboard propulsion capabilities and would otherwise drift naturally toward earth and burn up in the atmosphere by later this year.
Katalyst Space Technologies, headquartered in Flagstaff, Arizona, said it designed, constructed and tested the LINK vehicle on an unprecedented nine-month production schedule, under a $30m Nasa contract.
Plans call for the spacecraft to be deployed from the payload compartment of the Pegasus rocket, which would soar into space after being released from the belly of a Lockheed TriStar jetliner flying some 40,000 feet (12,200 meters) over the Pacific.
The plane would take off headed east from a US air base on the tiny Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.
Once jettisoned from the Pegasus rocket, LINK would head off on a month-long voyage to the vicinity of Nasa’s orbiting telescope, which has been observing distant galaxies and black holes since 2004. It was originally designed for the study of gamma ray bursts in the cosmos.
By late July, if all goes according to plan, LINK will fly to within roughly 9.6km of the observatory before initiating its final approach and “proximity operations.”
The autonomous spacecraft, equipped with three sets of thrusters and five sensor systems, is then expected to take another week to rendezvous with SWIFT and use its three robot arms, each fitted with hand-like grippers, to gently grab hold of the satellite.
The pair would orbit the earth in tandem at roughly 17,000 miles (27,360km) per hour.
Once LINK has firmly grasped the observatory, it should take another 60 days to tow it to its target altitude about 373 miles (600km) above earth, double the height it will have fallen to just before rescue, according to Katalyst.
&uuid=(email))