Man, I was really excited for this thing to get going, but when the first blog entry went up I figured it may be a lost cause. From the get-go, they lost two reaction control wheels, and it was in a nasty 2-axis spin. A few blogs later and they had the spin reduced, but they were unable to report success with the wheels or anything, and all indications showed they were simply trying to compensate for a degraded spacecraft from the ground.
Obviously you can't approach and grapple and reboost a telescope when your own craft is spinning crazily and doesn't have possession over its basic attitude control. It looks like they're still going through the motions of rendezvous and cooperative recovery. But we're gonna lose SWIFT, and that seems like a minor tragedy to me.
Man, I was really excited for this thing to get going, but when the first blog entry went up I figured it may be a lost cause. From the get-go, they lost two reaction control wheels, and it was in a nasty 2-axis spin. A few blogs later and they had the spin reduced, but they were unable to report success with the wheels or anything, and all indications showed they were simply trying to compensate for a degraded spacecraft from the ground.
First-party blogs and all updates here: https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/
Obviously you can't approach and grapple and reboost a telescope when your own craft is spinning crazily and doesn't have possession over its basic attitude control. It looks like they're still going through the motions of rendezvous and cooperative recovery. But we're gonna lose SWIFT, and that seems like a minor tragedy to me.