NASA has fallen asleep its famous hunting telescope to the planet because it's almost running out of fuel

The Kepler Space Telescope is almost running out of fuel, which means its life is coming to an end, NASA announced today. The US space agency said on Monday that it had put the fighter spacecraft to the planet in "hibernation" mode on Monday, and that a Kepler reactivation plan next month could deplete all of the remaining fuel.

NASA launched the Kepler Space Telescope in 2009 an effort to find out more about the number and frequency of planets in our galaxy. To the delight of many, scientists using Kepler have found an abundance of exoplanets, or planets outside of our solar system. The spacecraft, which is about 100 million kilometers from Earth, has scanned only a small part of our galactic neighborhood, but its efforts have led scientists to discover 2,650 confirmed planets up to 39, now.

They are of all shapes and sizes. The planets that researchers have discovered range from large and strange – like a planet of size Jupiter orbiting a system of binary stars – to planets closer to Earth and orbiting the Earth. Each discovery taught us more about how planets are formed, how many planets exist, and even how our planet appeared. And many rewards are still in Kepler's generosity. There are thousands of other unconfirmed findings, and researchers continue to find new ways to delve into Kepler's data.

NASA announces its intention to return Kepler to service in early August, when it will order the spacecraft to point its antenna to Earth to download data from its most recent study from the sky. It is not clear if there is enough fuel to make this transfer. If there is, however, once the transfer is complete, NASA plans to launch what will be the discrete 19th "observation campaign" of Kepler's "K2" secondary mission, which began in 2014 The maneuvers required to steer the antenna towards the Earth are the Kepler is the most fuel – intensive and, at any time, the tank of the spacecraft could finally run dry.

NASA knew that Kepler would one day run out of fuel, and when she started the K2 mission, the agency originally planned to be able to squeeze only 10 observation campaigns from what remained in the tank. But putting the spaceship into safe mode is a sign that Kepler really works on fumes. So now, "sending the data back to Earth is the highest priority for the remaining fuel," says NASA.

Kepler went into hibernation before, and the space telescope encountered a good deal of problems during its nine years. When he switched to a similar mode in 2016, he caused NASA to declare a temporary "spaceship emergency" while the team was working to bring the telescope back online.

But Kepler's biggest problem came in 2012, when two of the telescope's four gyroscopic "reaction wheels" stopped working. The momentum generated by these wheels has been used to make good adjustments to the targeting of the telescope. Losing one was good, but losing two was a potential death sentence. Kepler had completed his initial mission and it seemed that NASA could slow down the operation of the telescope – until a smart solution emerges inside the agency to use the pressure that the rays of the sun exert on the solar panels of the spaceship one of the wheels. This solution gave Kepler a second life with the K2 mission, which she continues to play today.

NASA has already launched a successor to Kepler, so even when he dies, the hunt for exoplanets will continue. The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, went around the world on a SpaceX Falcon 9 earlier this year, and has already taken its first image of the galactic sky. TESS has a 400 times larger field of view than Kepler, which will allow him to study hundreds of thousands more stars than his predecessor. TESS will also search for planets around stars that are within tens or hundreds of light-years away from us, unlike Kepler, who has studied stars thousands of light-years away. our solar system.