Nate Rott

speaker

30 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 18 Jul

Nate Rott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Up First from NPR · ICE Shootings Update, Swift Observatory Rescue, World Cup Final Preview · 18 Jul 2026 podcast

Thank you. matched

Yeah, right. matched

Like probably would have like Matt Damon or Ryan Gosling since they seem to be in pretty much every space movie these days. matched

Yes, yes. matched

But actually, Aisha, the hero of this story, if it all works out as planned, is not going to be any single person. matched

It's going to be a robot called Link that's roughly the size of a refrigerator. matched

And of course, the many people who designed and built and launched it a couple of weeks ago. matched

Yeah, so it's launched and it's in low Earth orbit right now. matched

And after it completes a bunch of tests, which are ongoing, it's going to link up with the Neil Garrell Swift Observatory, or SWIFT for short. matched

Yeah, that's right. matched

So Swift was launched in 2004 to study something called gamma ray bursts, which are these super energetic, super rare cosmic explosions that can occur when a star goes supernova or when like two dense neutron stars collide. matched

Here's Brad Sanko, a research astrophysicist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. matched

And SWIFT was designed to swiftly adjust its position to capture data on them. matched

And it's been used to gather other data, too, since it's been launched, helping scientists here on Earth better understand our universe. matched

Yeah, so this part is wild. matched

Senko says pretty much every satellite or object in low Earth orbit is slowly falling back to Earth. matched

But the timeline for Swift has sped up by years because of all the solar activity that's been happening recently with our sun. matched

So there have been a lot of solar flares over the last couple of years, which have caused these beautiful auroras. matched

Senko says, like anybody, he appreciates them too. matched

So without any intervention, Aisha, they now think Swift will re-enter the atmosphere and burn up by the end of this year. matched

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