NASA brought a robot to rescue the Swift telescope falling to Earth.

The LINK spacecraft that Lee’s team came up with is a three-armed robot about the size of a refrigerator, equipped with cameras and guidance systems and controlled by tiny sensors.

The spacecraft, which launched Friday, will spend the next few weeks activating its systems one by one: power, navigation, the cameras and sensors it relies on, and making sure each one survives the journey.

Rocket’s Pegasus XL rocket launched LINK close to Swift’s orbit, but the three-armed robot still has a lot of work to do to get closer to Swift – the observatory’s altitude is changing every week.

The rescue spacecraft itself must home in on a moving target. But after three to four weeks of initiation, it should eventually be drawn aside.

LINK will use its cameras and sensors to zoom in on the telescope and photograph it from all angles. Engineers speculated where they would hold, but the Swift must have changed in its twenty-year orbit, Barber said.

“The Swift telescope is not designed to be held in space and its orbit changed. So the rescue mission has to slowly approach and attach itself to the telescope.”

Then comes the nail-biting moment: the grip, when LINK’s three arms come out.

If all goes to plan, LINK grabs Swift and takes him to where he can continue his important work.

“It fires the engines to slowly bring the telescope’s orbit back up to altitude,” Barber said.

“It’s a very slow, graceful lift, not a sudden rise to high orbit.”

Over the next two to three months, LINK will fire off its tiny pulses and slowly pull the pair upward, about 220 miles (360 km) toward Swift’s old home, 373 miles (600 km) above Earth.

The mission is huge and has never been done before. A lot has to go right to be successful. If that happens, attention will be focused on whether the next rescue mission could be to save the more famous Hubble Space Telescope.

Follow it.