A history-making robotic rescue mission scheduled to launch next year will fly on a rocket dropped from a plane.

In September, NASA announced that it has chosen Arizona company Katalyst Space Technologies to boost the altitude of its Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, a space telescope whose orbit has gotten dangerously low since its November 2004 launch.

Today (Nov. 19), we learned how Katalyst's spacecraft will get off the ground — aboard Pegasus, an air-launched rocket built by aerospace giant Northrop Grumman.

The $500 million Swift observatory was built by Orbital Sciences, a company that in 2014 became Orbital ATK, which was then acquired by Northrop Grumman in 2018. The space telescope has been studying gamma-ray bursts — the most powerful explosions in the universe since the Big Ba

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