In a routine scheduled contact, the Kepler entered into Emergency Mode, alarming NASA’s engineers.
Advertisement
“It was the quick response and determination of the engineers throughout the weekend that led to the recovery”, Mission manager Charlie Sobeck said in a web posting from NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
It’s been a tense few days for the Kepler team since a regularly scheduled interchange with the spacecraft on Thursday, April 8th revealed that it had switched over to Emergency Mode. At that time the ship was operating properly. Kepler was said to have cost $600 million and was indeed considered to be a success for detecting about 1,041 exoplanets and another 3,600 “candidate” planets, which scientists will likely consider as alien planets as well. A new mission was inaugurated in 2014 called “K2” where the space telescope is set to discover more exoplanets but also look towards young stars as well as supernovae.
On Sunday, the craft directed its communications antenna toward Earth, “enabling telemetry and historical event data to be downloaded to the ground”, the space agency says.
Although the exact reason of the problem is unclear, Kepler mission control has declared a spacecraft emergency.
This isn’t the first issue for Kepler, which launched in 2009.
Mayday, mayday! We have trouble in space. However, the speed of the communications is quite slow as Kepler has nearly reached 72 million miles in distance from the Earth. Now, almost three years into its current mission, Kepler has found 1,000 more. It takes 13 minutes for a message to travel to the spacecraft and back. The observatory finished its last observations March 23 and was about to aim its imager toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy when it went into emergency mode last week. Sobeck said the emergency mode was very “fuel intensive”, and it was their top priority to recover the probe.
Advertisement
Ground telescopes are part of the rogue planet survey, and Earth-based astronomers have started their observations. In May 2013, the second of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed, ending the spacecraft’s original planet hunt.
