Kepler Telescope Emergency: NASA’s $600 Million Spacecraft In Trouble Again
For the second time now, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope is in emergency mode, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said in a statement. As Tech Time reports, the spacecraft was fully operational and in good condition last April 4, but Charlie Sobeck, Kepler and K2 mission manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center, announced how it had been discovered last April 7 that the Kepler is presently in its lowest operational mode.
The telescope is consuming a significant amount of fuel as scientists are working to find creative fixes. No one knows what exactly the problem is, and efforts are especially difficult because the spacecraft is 75 million miles away. It takes 13 minutes to register a command and receive a response on Earth. As a result, the telescope now has priority access to ground-based communication on NASA’s Deep Space Network. Emergency mode will force Kepler to continue to burn quickly through its power supply, so there’s a great deal of urgency to save the $600 million spacecraft.
“You’re not watching it unfold in real time,” Dustin Putnam, a lead for Kepler, said in a NASA statement. “You’re watching it as it unfolded a few minutes ago, because of the time the data takes to get back from the spacecraft.”
NASA’s Kepler telescope captures images of the shockwave of an exploding star. https://t.co/xbummSkITN
— Zulfikar Ramzan (@Zulfikar_Ramzan) March 30, 2016
Launched in 2009, Kepler’s primary mission was to look for planets outside the Solar System. By the time the mission wrapped in 2012, Kepler found some 5,000 exoplanets. Of those, 1,000 were confirmed. The mission halted in 2012 when the spacecraft lost one of its four reaction wheels. The Christian Science Monitor notes how engineers later calculated that sun pressure could “function as a “third wheel” that would hold the telescope steady for 80 days at a time.” In other words, NASA used the sun’s radiation pressure to align the spacecraft.
NASA renamed the mission K2, and the purpose of this 2014 extended mission is to provide study material of astronomical occurrences and objects using gravitational microlensing. NASA program managers wrote in a press release announcing that the K2 mission will “observe target fields along the ecliptic plane, the orbital path of planets in our solar system also know as the zodiac, for approximately 75-day campaigns.”
“The chance for the K2 mission to use gravity to help us explore exoplanets is one of the most fantastic astronomical experiments of the decade,” said Steve Howell, project scientist for NASA’s Kepler and K2 mission.
RELATED: Meteorologist Bonnie Schneider talks about a mysterious star spotted by NASA’s Kepler telescope that some scientists believe may have a link to an extraterrestrial, ancient civilization. Check it out in the clip above.
Earlier this year, NASA announced the telescope had found 100 “alien planets,” which hold possibilities for water – and life.
“Kepler has produced results needed to take the next big step forward in humankind’s search for life in our galaxy – providing information needed for future missions that will ultimately determine the atmospheric composition of Earth-sized exoplanets to discover if they could be habitable,” William Borucki, Kepler investigator at Ames Research Center, said.
NASA’s Kepler space telescope captured the first ever images of the big shockwave of an exploding star located 1.2 billion lightyears away. NASA says it’s lucky the telescope recorded the 20-minute shock breakout.
“In order to see something that happens on timescales of minutes, like a shock breakout, you want to have a camera continuously monitoring the sky,” said Peter Garnavich, the scientist in charge of the team that found it. “You don’t know when a supernova is going to go off, and Kepler’s vigilance allowed us to be a witness as the explosion began.”
NASA hopes to restore Kepler’s operations back to normal as it did before. A second serious telescope malfunction occurred in 2013 when another reaction wheel failed, and scientists attributed it to a structural failure of the wheel bearing.
Do you believe this latest telescope emergency threatens to permanently end mankind’s quest to confirm the existence of life on other planets?
[Image via ShutterStock]
