Brad Sanko

speaker

81 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 8 Jul

Brad Sanko’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Short Wave · NASA's race against time to rescue a falling satellite · 8 Jul 2026 podcast

I think of them almost like lobster claws.

They just, you know, are designed to pinch and grab hold at three stable points on the bottom of SWIFT.

Once they have established a firm grip and the ability to control Swift, they have an electric propulsion system that will allow it to, over the course of several months, gently push Swift up to a higher orbit so that it can then continue its science observations.

Absolutely.

We've definitely been playing on the Swift themes for some time.

It's called that because it can slew very rapidly to repoint its sensitive X-ray and UV telescopes anywhere on the sky within a few minutes, which is a very unique capability in the NASA astrophysics portfolio.

Swift.

That's right.

And the only other thing I mean, we talk about this a little bit, but just, you know, honestly, we think this is going to work, but we don't know for sure.

It's just a very different kind of mission than we're used to doing at NASA.

Ultimately, Swift is going to reenter if it's unsuccessful.

You know, Swift was going to reenter anyway, and we've learned a lot from this process.

We did this because of the scientific opportunity to demonstrate this exciting new technology.

Yes, so this is the first ever attempt to do a capture for a satellite that was not intended to do it.

Hubble, for example, has been serviced a number of times by astronauts flying on the space shuttle, but Hubble was designed for that and it was done by astronauts, it was done by people.

This is fully robotic, fully autonomous, and Swift was never designed for this.

So it really is a technological first of its kind.

So not only is this a technical first of its kind mission, but the schedule is also very unique.

So we identified this problem a little more than a year ago.

We brought on Catalyst in September, and they have been responsible for designing, building, testing, and launching Lync

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