A two-decade-old NASA telescope is on an unstable orbit, and there is a 90 percent chance that it might come burning down in an uncontrolled reentry by the end of 2026. NASA has awarded a private contract to space technology company Katalyst to perform a never-before operation to save this orbiting observatory. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

The telescope in question is the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory , which was launched on November 20, 2004. In its 21 years, the telescope has studied the most powerful explosions in the universe, gamma-ray bursts, as well as other events, including interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS . The orbit of satellites and spacecraft near Earth naturally decay over time, due to the extremely ten

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