Antoine Meunier, rédacteur en chef du site Lachroniquespatiale.com – 01/07

In March 2024, NASA faced a quiet crisis. The Swift telescope, a satellite that has been detecting violent cosmic explosions called gamma-ray bursts since 2004, was slowly falling out of orbit. The mission was originally designed to last just two years, but it has now been running for over two decades, detecting more than 1,000 gamma-ray bursts in that time. These events are random, violent explosions that occur across the universe, and Swift has been the primary tool for studying them. But by early 2024, the telescope had drifted down to an altitude of roughly 350–360 kilometers. Without intervention, it would inevitably re-enter the atmosphere and disintegrate. The clock was ticking.

The gamble: a small satellite to push a telescope back up

NASA’s first instinct was to plan a replacement mission, but that would take at least a decade and cost a fortune. Instead, the agency chose a much riskier path: send a small satellite to rendezvous with Swift, dock with it, and push it back up to a higher orbit. This is a genuine gamble, a "coup de poker" as the guest describes it. The plan is to launch a small spacecraft that will gradually raise Swift’s altitude from its current 350–360 kilometers to somewhere between 550 and 600 kilometers. If successful, this could extend the telescope’s life by another ten years, buying NASA time to develop a proper successor mission.