“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 investigaor at Ames Research Center, said.
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According to the mission engineers, the spacecraft entered into EM about 36 hours prior to maneuvering the spacecraft towards the center of the Milky Way.
One major challenge to fixing a spacecraft mid-mission is the remoteness of the work. Sobeck said the mission has declared a spacecraft emergency to get priority access to NASA’s Deep Space Network to aid in efforts to recover the spacecraft. Taking into account that Emergency Mode (EM) is considered the lowest operational level for a spacecraft, it’s imperative for NASA’s engineers to solve the problem as soon as possible. The extended mission’s motivation is to proceed with planet chasing and give study material to supernovae, youthful stars, and other galactic articles utilizing gravitational microlensing.
“You’re not watching it unfold in real time”, Dustin Putnam, a lead for Kepler, said in a NASA statement. However, they can’t communicate with Kepler easily. The spacecraft is currently 75 million miles away from Earth right now, according to NASA, so any communications signal traveling at the speed of light will take up to 13 minutes to travel to and from the spacecraft.
NASA launched Kepler in March of 2009, and initially, the mission to find exoplanets was a complete success, Sarah Lewin wrote for Space.com.
These are not the first technical difficulties for the spacecraft, and the NASA operations team has proven up to the task before. In other words, NASA used the sun’s radiation pressure to align the spacecraft. NASA’s Kepler space telescope should be proceeding with its K2 stretched out mission to chase down shrouded exoplanets, yet now researchers say the rocket is stuck in an unfortunate situation (once more).
Two years ago, NASA began Kepler’s second mission.
This isn’t the first time that Kepler has suffered some kind of malfunction. The second wheel failed in May 2013. “The spacecraft health is very good”, said John Troeltzsch, Kepler program manager at Ball Aerospace, the mission’s prime contractor, at an American Astronomical Society meeting in Florida in January.
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Henderson said that in the K2 mission, the scientists will look out for those events that are due to a lensing system and is just a free-floating planet. In any case, in July of that year, Kepler encountered a disappointment in one of its four gyroscopic response wheels, which point the rocket.
