Kepler could be toast

mickmackey1

Well it looks like the aliens just don't want to be found :cool:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22548886

Tomk1

"Like with any stuck wheel that you might be familiar with on the ground, we can try jiggling it," said Kepler deputy project manager Charlie Sobeck,

http://www.space.com/21173-kepler-alien-planet-mission-future.html

Wonder what the failure exactly is, a mechanical failure from usage or something like dust blocking movement.

Mickeroo

Hope they manage to sort it, its made some pretty exciting discoveries in such a short time. At least it can't be classed as failure.

dbran

It could still get a new lease of life looking for Near Earth Asteroids. It has plenty of fuel on board and this work will not need it to use as many giros as pointing accuracy is not as important.

Leader of the Furlings

NASA Has Stopped Trying To Fix The Kepler Space Telescope

Well, NASA's crippled Kepler space telescope, launched in 2009, is officially beyond repair. Two of the four wheels used to align the telescope have failed over the past year, and NASA engineers haven't been able to get either of them working again. NASA announced today that attempts to fully restore the spacecraft have ceased.

This may not spell the total end of Kepler's mission, though. NASA will still try to figure out a way to use the spacecraft for whatever scientific research it can manage in its current condition, with one reaction wheel short of a workable set. The agency put out a call for scientific white papers proposing alternate uses for Kepler a few weeks ago.

Kepler was originally designed to hunt for Earth-sized exoplanets in the galaxy, and during its initial four-year mission, it found more than 100. Its mission was extended in April 2012, and scientists are still sorting through all the data it has sent back in the meantime.

paddy147

mickmackey1 wrote: »

Well it looks like the aliens just don't want to be found :cool:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22548886

Eh,they live on Marklar,sure everyone knows that....:pac::D

Tomk1

Read about this in the popsci site comments:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_(spacecraft)
Should be launched end of the year by the ESA.

detection of tens of thousands of extra-solar planetary systems

_Tombstone_

Bump!

It's 75 million miles away and it takes a radio signal 13 minutes travelling at light speed to reach it. Cool.

So this thing got repurposed in the end and was nearly all set to (literally 14 hours from) start it's new mission when it went into "Emergency Mode" over the weekend. Odd thing about that mode is that its its lowest operational mode, but it is also the most fuel-intesive. which Kepler doesn't have alot left of.

So NASA declared an "spacecraft emergency" which grants the Kepler team priority access to the Deep Space Network, a spacecraft telecommunications system run by NASA. In the end they saved the day.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/11/11408620/nasa-kepler-telescope-emergency-mode-stable


The repurposed mission of the Kepler space telescope, and other ground-based observatories have teamed up to kick-off a global experiment in exoplanet observation. Their mission: survey millions of stars toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy in search of distant stars' planetary outposts and exoplanets wandering between the stars.

While today's planet-hunting techniques have favored finding exoplanets near their sun, the outer regions of a planetary system have gone largely unexplored. In the exoplanet detection toolkit, scientists have a technique well suited to search these farthest outreaches and the space in between the stars. This technique is called gravitational microlensing.

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/kepler/searching-for-far-out-and-wandering-worlds





^^

As an exoplanet passes in front of a more distant star, its gravity causes the trajectory of the starlight to bend, and in some cases results in a brief brightening of the background star as seen by a telescope. The artistic concept illustrates this effect. This phenomenon of gravitational microlensing enables scientists to search for exoplanets that are too distant and dark to detect any other way.

Capt'n Midnight

update from that link http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/11/11408620/nasa-kepler-telescope-emergency-mode-stable

he planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has been returned to stable condition just days after it slipped into "emergency mode," according to NASA. Team engineers were able to point the spacecraft's communications antenna toward Earth on Sunday morning and have since been downloading data that will tell them exactly what went wrong.
...
The Kepler team will make a decision about returning the telescope to "science mode" once it has completed health checks on all the recent data from the spacecraft.