NASA has called off a $30 million mission to rescue its aging Swift space telescope after Katalyst Space's Link spacecraft developed persistent control and positioning problems. The Associated Press reports: Katalyst said Link will not attempt to capture Swift and boost it to a higher orbit because of problems with controlling the spacecraft. NASA said this means the telescope will plunge through the atmosphere after more than 20 years of tracking some of the biggest explosions in the universe like gamma ray bursts and exploding stars. Its demise is not expected before October. NASA paid $30 million to Katalyst in an attempt to raise the telescope to a safer, longer-lasting orbit. Intense solar activity caused it to lose altitude faster than expected. The rescue spacecraft went into an uncontrollable spin a few weeks after its liftoff in early July. While flight controllers managed to slow Link's tumble, issues continued to plague its pointing and positioning in orbit. "This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting," NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said in a statement. As a consolation prize, Katalyst will continue to operate Link in proximity with the telescope to demonstrate capabilities for future rescue operations. Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said it was an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline that was thrown together in under a year. "We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way," Lee said in a statement. "We have already learned a tremendous amount."

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There's been a change to NASA's launch of six satellites for solar storms research. Space.com reports that those satellites "were originally slated to lift off on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket but have now been assigned a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, according to a NASA mission update." [NASA's Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment mision — or SunRISE] will fly to space as part of a rideshare mission sponsored by the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command. Though it's not stated specifically in the NASA release, that may be a hint as to why the mission's rocket was changed. On its most recent launch [U.S. Space Force mission USSF-87], Vulcan experienced an anomaly in one of its solid rocket boosters — the second such incident to occur during the rocket's four launches to date. Vulcan succeeded in delivering the USSF-87 payload to its designated orbit on that launch, but the recurrence of the booster issue during ascent prompted the Space Force to pause national security launches on Vulcan until it could be addressed. Which mission SunRISE will be manifested on has not yet been released, but Space Force's Space Systems Command [SSC] has already shifted other launches between Vulcan and SpaceX's Falcon 9... Falcon Heavy is SpaceX's heavy-lift launch vehicle... that consists of three modified Falcon 9 first stages, and has launched 12 times since it debuted in 2018. Four of those have delivered national security payloads to orbit, with the most recent of those, USSF-52, launching in December 2023. Falcon Heavy's most recent flight overall occurred this past April, when it sent the Viasat-3 F3 telecom satellite to orbit. Falcon Heavy's next mission will lift off with NASA's Nancy Roman Space Telescope, currently set for no earlier than Aug. 30. SunRISE is scheduled to launch later this year... Sientists will use data collected by the satellites "to improve prediction models for impending space weather, which in turn could lead to mitigation plans to better thwart the effects of such solar events on orbital infrastructure." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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