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If anything deserves a rest, it's Kepler. In less than 10 years since its launch, the Kepler Space Telescope has confirmed the existence of more than 2,500 worlds beyond ours, more than any other observatory.
Last week, NASA engineers working on Kepler discovered that the fuel level was approaching They decided to halt scientific operations and put the spaceship into hibernation mode to save the fuel and preserve the data that he has already collected.
This 83-day campaign is focused on an area of sky near the constellation of Cancer. observe star clusters, binary black holes, asteroids, exoplanets and more. He had about two good months of observation before the researchers decided to fall asleep.
On August 2, he will put himself in position to be able to send to Earth all the data that he has already collected. From there, returning engineers might decide to restart if there is enough fuel left to launch the next observation campaign.
"It's like trying to decide when to refuel." Stop now? Or try going to the next station? In our case, there is no next station, so we want to stop collecting data while we are still comfortable that we can bring the satellite [the data] back to Earth, "Charlie Sobek , System Engineer for the Kepler Space Telescope Mission, written in May
This is just the latest in Kepler's essays. In 2013, after the failure of two of the gyroscopic wheels of the spacecraft, the team that was working with the telescope back on Earth was unable to remain stable and focused enough to continue to take data . The researchers then found a solution: use the sun to stabilize Kepler. Revived, Kepler reborn in K2 and discovered hundreds of other exoplanets, sweeping segments of the sky in 82-day campaigns.
Given the recent decision to shorten the 18th campaign, it is unlikely that Kepler will join Campaign 20, the last campaign to which researchers were invited to submit research proposals, even though it has enough fuel for a 19th. But when K2 started in 2014, the engineers only thought that they had enough fuel for 10 campaigns.
As Kepler enters his last days, the story of another telescope is just beginning. In April, NASA launched its next generation Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
TESS will resume where Kepler stopped, monitoring more than 200,000 stars in a 300-year radius of the Earth. The scientific data from this mission are expected from January 2019 and researchers will use the techniques they have perfected during Kepler's missions to identify even more planets – the badysis now taking weeks rather than months or years.
The data collected by KST to identify a potential planet orbiting a bright star in a few weeks.
"We found one of the most exciting planets that K2 found in all his mission, and we did it faster than" Ian Crossfield, an MIT professor who directed the # 39, study, said in a statement. "This shows the way forward for the TESS mission to do the same thing with a shovel, all over the sky, for the next few years."
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