AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Hundreds of miles up in the sky in the exosphere, a rescue mission is underway to save a valuable telescope that's falling to the Earth. Nate Rott with NPR's science podcast Short Wave is following the effort and joins us now. Welcome.
NATE ROTT, BYLINE: Thank you.
RASCOE: All right, so this almost sounds like the plot of a space thriller. Tell us more.
ROTT: (Laughter) Yeah, right? It, like, probably would have, like, Matt Damon or Ryan Gosling since they seem to be in pretty much every space movie these days.
RASCOE: Yes. Yes (laughter).
ROTT: Yeah. But actually, Ayesha, the hero of this story - if it all works out as planned - is not going to be any single person. It's going to be a robot called LINK that's roughly the size of a refrigerator, and of course, the many people who designed and built and launched it a couple of weeks ago.
RASCOE: OK, so where is this hero robot now?
ROTT: Yeah. It's launched, and it's in low Earth orbit right now. After it completes a bunch of tests which are ongoing, it's going to link up with the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, or Swift for short.
RASCOE: OK, so tell me about Swift. This is the telescope that Link is trying to save, right?
ROTT: Yeah, that's right. So Swift was launched in 2004 to study something called gamma-ray bursts, which are these super-energetic, super-rare cosmic explosions that can occur when a star goes supernova or when, like, two dense neutron stars collide. Here's Brad Cenko, a research astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
BRAD CENKO: It lasts for only a few seconds, but they radiate more energy in that period of time than the sun will in its entire lifetime. So these are the most dramatic explosions since the Big Bang.
ROTT: And Swift was designed to swiftly adjust its position to capture data on them, and it's been used to gather other data too since it's been launched, helping scientists here on Earth better understand our universe.
RASCOE: OK, I see what you did there with the name Swift...
ROTT: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, yeah.
RASCOE: ...And swiftly. But why is Swift in trouble?
ROTT: Yeah, so this part is wild. Cenko says pretty much every satellite or object in low Earth orbit is slowly falling back to Earth. But the timeline for Swift has sped up by years because of all the solar activity that's been happening recently with our sun. So there have been a lot of solar flares over the last couple of years, which have caused these beautiful auroras. Cenko says, like anybody, he appreciates them too.
CENKO: But every time I see one of those, I cringe 'cause every time the sun does that, it causes the Earth's atmosphere to puff up. And that leads Swift to fall at a faster rate.
ROTT: So without any intervention, Ayesha, they now think Swift will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up by the end of this year.
RASCOE: OK, that's really soon.
ROTT: Yeah. So that's why they raced to launch this robot, which was designed by an Arizona-based startup to try and give Swift a boost. Its goal is to sync up with Swift, to grab onto it with these, like, three lobster-like claw robotic arms and then gently push it up into a higher orbit. And, Ayesha, part of what makes this thing so remarkable is that this has never been done before. Like, the Hubble Space Telescope has been serviced, but it was done by people, by astronauts in space. This is a fully-autonomous robot lifting a telescope that was never designed to be lifted.
RASCOE: Assuming this works and that they're able to successfully lift this telescope, could it work for other satellites and telescopes?
ROTT: Well, that's definitely the hope, that instead of, you know, just letting commercial satellites or research ones re-enter the atmosphere and burn up, this technology could allow them to be serviced. So, you know, components could be upgraded, their altitudes boosted, which Cenko says would make the space industry much more sustainable. But he also says this technology is likely to draw a lot of interest from the defense community if it works because, you know, being able to move another country's satellite could be something that governments are interested in doing.
RASCOE: That's Nate Rott from NPR's science podcast Short Wave. Thank you so much.
ROTT: Hey, thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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