Zitat von ZRJetzt war es soweit, daß ich die erste Schraube löste. Und damit bekam ich meine zweite Lektion erteilt. Es war einer von den größten Schrauben, die hier verbaut worden waren, eine 4-40er Schraube mit versenktem Kopf von einem Dreiviertelzoll Länge. Ich würde dreißig Drehungen brauchen, um sie ganz herauszuschrauben. Ich schaffte nicht einmal die erste Drehung. Sobald ich anfing, mit meinen Schraubenzieher Druck auf den Kopf auszuüben, brach er glatt ab.
Ja – die Außenhaut des Satelliten hatte sich hübsch aufgewärmt, aber der Schraubenschaft hatte immer noch eine Temperatur von zweihundert Grad unter null und war spröder als Glas. ... Von jetzt an wärmte ich jede Schraube erst einmal vor, bevor ich sie in Angriff nahm. Ich hatte einen umgebauten Lötkolben, den ich gegen den Schraubenkopf drücken konnte. Die Wärme wurde durch das gut leitende Metall abgeleitet und machte es weniger spröde.
EVA 2026.
Zitat It was the 282nd EVA devoted to station assembly and maintenance, the fifth so far this year, the second for Menon and the first for Adenot, now the first French woman to walk in space. Total ISS EVA time now stands at 74 days 10 hours and 44 minutes since station assembly began in 1998. Menon’s total to date is 12 hours and 50 minutes.
Today’s excursion was only partially successful. Menon and Adenot successfully removed a failed space-to-ground antenna, but freeing tight power and data cables, installing locking pins in the antenna’s gimbal assembly and unbolting it from its boom took longer than expected even with a fair amount of elbow grease turning a ratchet wrench.
In the end, flight controllers decided there wasn’t enough time for the spacewalkers to move the failed antenna to its permanent storage location or to retrieve the spare antenna and install it. Instead, the failed antenna was lashed down near its boom, where it will remain indefinitely, and its replacement remains bolted to a storage platform.
The ISS is equipped with two such antennas and only one is needed for normal operations. But it’s a critical system, and managers would like to have two healthy antennas in place for redundancy.
Another spacewalk is on tap next Tuesday, and flight controllers are considering whether to get the replacement antenna installed then or whether to stick with already planned tasks and defer the antenna replacement to a future EVA.
Zitat NASA@NASA Due to an ongoing commercial spacecraft attitude control issue, the LINK spacecraft will not capture or boost NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to a higher altitude as planned. Read more about next steps: https://go.nasa.gov/4ggh7ty
[An artist concept of the Swift observatory, a satellite with two dark solar panels, against a nighttime view of Earth. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Conceptual Image Lab] 12:03 AM · Aug 20, 2026
Zitat Due to an ongoing commercial spacecraft attitude control issue, NASA and Katalyst Space announced Wednesday the LINK spacecraft will not capture or boost an agency satellite to a higher altitude to extend its science mission as planned. However, LINK still will attempt to conduct rendezvous and proximity operations with NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory to demonstrate key capabilities for the future of space exploration.
“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting. The team moved with extraordinary speed to give Swift a chance to carry out more science while advancing capabilities America will need for satellite servicing in the future. We are going to learn everything we can from LINK’s rendezvous attempt and put those lessons to work on the missions that follow.”
NASA and Katalyst are working closely to assess next steps for rendezvous and gather as much data as possible to inform future satellite servicing operations.
“We knew this was a high-risk, high-reward mission – a first-of-its kind attempt, developed on an unprecedented timeline driven by the Sun’s activity,” said Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director, Astrophysics Division, NASA Headquarters in Washington. “We were all hoping for more science from Swift. But we knew the takeaways from this mission would be worthwhile either way, and we have gained so much through the series of accomplishments up to this point.”
Zitat NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on a robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit.
The rescue satellite, named Link, launched July 3 on a journey to fly up to NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, capture it with three robotic arms, and boost its orbit high enough to escape a looming reentry. Link is about the size of a refrigerator, with two power-generating solar arrays and three xenon-fueled electric thrusters to send Swift into a safer, higher orbit.
Katalyst, the startup leading the Swift rescue effort, said Wednesday that “ongoing attitude control issues” will prevent the Link satellite from completing its rescue mission. The spacecraft is still alive, and Katalyst said it will make the most of Link’s remaining capacity, which may still allow it to get near enough to Swift for a demonstration of the satellite’s close-in navigation system.
“While the mission will not have the ending we originally intended, NASA and Katalyst are assessing what milestones remain ahead,” Katalyst said in a statement. “We will continue working to extract technical and operational value from the spacecraft.”
The Swift rescue mission was always risky. NASA awarded Katalyst a $30 million contract less than a year ago to build and launch the Link satellite. NASA said Katalyst had to launch the rescue mission by this summer in order to reach Swift before it falls back into Earth’s atmosphere and burns up.
“NASA should be willing to move quickly and take smart risks when the potential return is worth it, and that is exactly what we did with this mission,” said NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is not the outcome we were working toward, but it does not change why this mission was worth attempting.”
NASA gave Katalyst a remarkably tight schedule. It usually takes several years to ready a first-of-its-kind satellite for launch. Katalyst did it in nine months. The timeline forced hard trade-offs, with the schedule driving engineers to tolerate technical risks they might not otherwise accept. Everything seemed to go well during the satellite’s first few weeks in orbit.
That changed in late July when the Link spacecraft suddenly spun out of control. Katalyst hasn’t said what caused the problem, but two of the satellite’s three reaction wheels, used for attitude control, stopped working. There were also issues with cold gas thrusters used for finer pointing control. That left the satellite’s three low-impulse plasma thrusters as the only means of regaining control of Link’s orientation as it zipped around the Earth at nearly 5 miles per second.
But it wasn’t enough.
“Katalyst designed, developed, and launched an experimental spacecraft to go after an ambitious mission on an aggressive timeline,” Katalyst CEO Ghonhee Lee said. “We took on this high-risk, high-reward challenge and are proud of the milestones we reached along the way. We have already learned a tremendous amount, and now our job is to turn those lessons into something durable—building a repeatable playbook to inform future rendezvous and proximity operations and satellite servicing.”
While there is much to celebrate with Katalyst’s accomplishments, giving up on rescuing Swift will commit the nearly 22-year astrophysics mission to a fiery end. Swift is falling out of orbit and is expected to reenter the atmosphere later this year.
Zitat NASA's doomed Swift space telescope restarts science work after rescue mission fails
The nearly 22-year-old observatory is once again studying the cosmos, but its time in orbit is running out.
NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory is back to studying the universe after spending months in a low-drag configuration while awaiting an orbital rescue mission that ultimately fell short.
Mission controllers restarted two of Swift's three science instruments — its X-ray Telescope (XRT) and Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT) — on Aug. 26. Both instruments had been shut down in February as part of an effort to minimize atmospheric drag and keep the aging spacecraft in orbit long enough for another spacecraft to reach and boost it to a higher altitude, according to an Aug. 28 statement from NASA.
Swift's third instrument, the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT), remains offline. Operations of the BAT were halted in April to conserve power, allowing controllers to position Swift's solar panels in a way that further reduced drag from its interaction with Earth's atmosphere. NASA says the mission team hopes to resume data collection with the instrument within the next few weeks.
The return to science follows NASA's decision to abandon plans to boost Swift's orbit using LINK, a robotic servicing spacecraft built by the Arizona company Katalyst Space. LINK launched July 3 aboard a Northrop Grumman Pegasus XL rocket with the ambitious goal of rendezvousing with Swift, grabbing the observatory and raising its orbit.
However, the rescue mission encountered trouble in late July when LINK developed attitude-control problems that caused it to spin and disrupted communications. Two of the spacecraft's three reaction wheels were found to be inoperable, while its cold-gas thruster system also experienced some loss of functionality.
Although engineers managed to reduce LINK's spin and regain attitude control, NASA and Katalyst announced Aug. 19 that the spacecraft would no longer attempt to capture and boost Swift. Instead, LINK is expected to rendezvous with Swift and perform proximity operations, providing an opportunity to demonstrate technologies that could be used for future in-space satellite servicing missions — leaving Swift without the orbital boost intended to extend its life and its future increasingly uncertain.
Now that science operations have resumed — and the planned orbital boost is off the table — NASA expects Swift to reach that critical altitude within the next one to two months. Without intervention, the observatory is likely to crash back to Earth later this year, mostly burning up as it reenters the atmosphere, according to the space agency.
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