One of NASA’s premier space telescopes is falling, and an audacious mission to rescue it has just begun. The Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is months from dropping back to Earth, but if the rescue works, it could continue watching the sky for years to come.

All satellites’ orbits eventually decay, and Swift is no exception. The outer edges of Earth’s atmosphere have been dragging it down since it launched in 2004: its initial orbit was at an altitude of about 600 kilometres from the ground, and now it’s only about 375 kilometres up. Its descent in recent years was faster than expected because of powerful solar flares depositing energy into the atmosphere, puffing it outwards and increasing drag on satellites.

So if NASA wanted to keep Swift operating, the agency had few options. The one that won out was a proposal by Katalyst Space Technologies, a small start-up based in Arizona, to give the orbiting observatory a boost.

The plan rests on a satellite called LINK, designed to grab Swift with a trio of robotic arms and pull it upward. At less than 2 metres tall, its main body is only about one-third the size of Swift, but it is flanked by immense sheets of solar panels to power its thrusters and grappling arms.

LINK launched atop a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket on the morning of 3 July, in what is intended to be the final launch for Pegasus XL before it is retired. The spacecraft will now go through a few weeks of testing in space before it grabs Swift and slowly pushes upwards for about two months, letting go when it reaches its original 600-kilometre altitude. If all goes well, this manoeuvre will keep Swift operating for as much as a decade longer.

Swift was originally built to study gamma-ray bursts, which are the brightest and most powerful explosions in the universe. Over the years, it has detected about 1800 of these blasts, and has also made crucial discoveries about other cosmic objects, ranging from comets and planets to supernovae and black holes.

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Boosting it will allow it to continue observing, but if it works, it will also be an important demonstration that it is possible to save a space telescope. “Swift wasn’t designed to be serviced,” said Ghonhee Lee, CEO of Katalyst, in a . “By demonstrating we can quickly and cost-effectively extend its lifetime, we’re creating a blueprint for servicing spacecraft that were never designed for on-orbit maintenance.” This could be a cost-effective way to extend the lifetimes of other satellites as well, in particular the Hubble Space Telescope, which is predicted to fall in the 2030s if it doesn’t get a boost.

The history and future of space exploration: US

Embark on an extraordinary journey through the heart of the US’s space and astronomy landmarks, designed for curious minds and lifelong learners.

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More than 50 years after its launch, a Soviet spacecraft called Kosmos 482 is about to come crashing back to Earth. It was originally intended to land on the surface of Venus, but it started to fall apart in low Earth orbit and never made it beyond there. After decades of circling our planet in an oval-shaped orbit, it’s finally about to hurtle back to the ground.

Kosmos 482 launched in 1972, but because of secrecy during the cold war period, little is known about its structure or its exact mission. We only know it was headed for Venus because of other Soviet missions that were focused on our neighbouring world at the time and because the spacecraft appeared to attempt to launch on a trajectory there before it went to pieces. It isn’t clear what exactly caused the spacecraft failure, but three of the four fragments fell in New Zealand shortly after the launch.

The last fragment drifted into a higher orbit, with its closest point to Earth at about 210 kilometres up and its most distant about 9800 kilometres away. Over the years, particles from the very top of Earth’s atmosphere have slowed down this piece, shrinking its path around Earth, and it has finally gotten close enough to fall. It is expected to come down on 9 or 10 May.

The remaining bit of the spacecraft, its landing capsule, is estimated to be more than a metre wide with a mass of nearly 500 kilograms. Between its size and the likelihood that it was designed to survive a trip through Venus’s hot, dense atmosphere, it seems likely that it will survive its descent intact and hit the ground hard, at upwards of 200 kilometres per hour.

It is impossible to predict where exactly the last piece of Kosmos 482 will smash down. Based on its current orbit, it could hit anywhere on Earth between the latitudes of 52° north and 52° south – an area that covers everywhere from the southern tip of South America to parts of Canada and Russia. Thankfully, despite that huge swathe of possible landing spots, the probability that it will hit an inhabited area is low. “It’s an infinitesimally small number,” said Marcin Pilinski at the University of Colorado Boulder in a . “It will very likely land in the ocean.”

Pilinski is part of a team tracking the debris. As it continues to get closer, the possibilities for where and when it will land will narrow down. Space junk falling to Earth like this isn’t uncommon: about one orbiting object that NASA is tracking falls every day, and most either burn up in the atmosphere or hit the ocean. Kosmos 482 is just a particularly big and hardy piece of space junk.

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Inside NASA’s ambitious plan to bring the ISS crashing back to Earth

The International Space Station will burn up and splash down into the Pacific sometime around 2030. What could possibly go wrong? And will we ever see anything like the ISS again?

Blue Origin, the space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is set to launch its reusable New Glenn rocket for the first time on 10 January. If successful, the rocket could become a rival to SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket, which has become the go-to launch vehicle for companies looking to put large payloads into orbit.

What is New Glenn?

New Glenn is a 98 metre-tall rocket, around the height of a 30-storey building, designed to deliver payloads of up to 45 tonnes to low Earth orbit. It is expected to compete with SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy, which can carry about 64 tonnes of cargo.

The rocket has two stages. The first stage is designed to land on a sea platform, similar to Falcon Heavy, and Blue Origin claims it will be reusable for 25 missions. At the top of the rocket is a disposable upper stage where cargo and mission payloads can be stored.

When will the launch take place?

New Glenn has been cleared by the Federal Aviation Administration to launch in a three-hour window starting at 1am local time (6am GMT) on 10 January from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

A launch window had already been approved by the FAA for 6 January, but the 10 January window is the first to be confirmed by Blue Origin, too. “This is our first flight and we’ve prepared rigorously for it,” said Jarrett Jones at Blue Origin .

Blue Origin first aimed to launch New Glenn in 2020 after announcing the development of the rocket in 2016, but delays and setbacks have pushed back the inaugural launch.

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What will the test flight entail?

The main objective for the test flight, called NG-1, is for the rocket to reach orbit, but the second stage will also carry Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Pathfinder, a collection of communications devices, power systems and a flight computer for the Blue Ring spacecraft, which will help guide and manoeuvre future payloads in orbit.

Blue Origin is aiming to mimic the success of SpaceX’s rapid testing and development schedule, which involves launching as frequently as possible, even if some tests end in fiery explosions. “No matter what happens, we’ll learn, refine and apply that knowledge to our next launch,” said Jones.

Eventually, Blue Origin hopes to have New Glenn launch satellites as part of Amazon’s Project Kuiper, a planned satellite internet constellation similar to SpaceX’s Starlink, as well as deliver parts for a space station that Blue Origin is developing.

What other rockets has Blue Origin launched?

Blue Origin has previously focused on space tourism with its New Shepard rocket, which in 2021 launched its founder Jeff Bezos and three other passengers to an altitude of 107 kilometres. It has since launched a further eight crews to a similar altitude, with the most recent launch in November 2024.

Uranus’s strange magnetic field may be much less weird than astronomers first thought, which means its largest moons could be much more active, and even perhaps have global oceans.

Our only direct measurements of Uranus’s magnetic field come from NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft, which flew by the planet in 1986. The spacecraft’s readings suggested that the magnetic field was lopsided – meaning it wasn’t aligned with the planet’s rotation – as well as being unusually rich in extremely energetic electrons and devoid of the plasma that is common in the magnetic fields of other gas giants like Jupiter. Astronomers at the time thought the results so bizarre that they invoked complex physics to try to explain the readings – or simply dismissed them as evidence that Voyager 2’s instruments had gone haywire.

Now, at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and his colleagues have reanalysed the Voyager 2 data and found that it was skewed by a rare burst of solar wind that squashed Uranus’s magnetic field just before the spacecraft arrived, disturbing the readings. This means everything we thought we knew about Uranus’s magnetic field might be wrong, says Jasinski. “This kind of almost resets everything,” he says.

Jasinski and his team found that the solar wind compressed Uranus’s magnetic field to a size that it would typically only adopt 4 per cent of the time – but that scientists have, for the past 40 years, assumed was its normal state. The squashed magnetic field explains the previous strange results, such as its lack of plasma and highly energetic electrons, says Jasinski.

If there is, in fact, plasma in Uranus’s magnetic field – and Voyager 2 just happened to miss it – then it might not all come from the planet itself. Some might come from Uranus’s moons, the largest of which are called Titania and Oberon. Until now, we have assumed these moons were inert, but the new study leaves open the possibility that they are geologically active after all. This would fit with recent calculations indicating the moons might have hidden oceans. “The solar wind could have essentially eradicated all the evidence of active moons just before the flyby happened,” says Jasinski.