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Artist illustration of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope in search of exoplanets.
Credit: NASA
NASA knows that the Kepler probe, its iconic planet-hunting telescope, has run out of fuel since March and today (30 October) the agency provides an update on the status of the instrument .
The press conference will begin at 3 pm EDT (19:00 GMT), and you can watch it live on Space.com, courtesy of NASA TV.
According to NASA's latest announcement, released Oct. 23, the Kepler Space Telescope was offline just days after the start of a new campaign.
Recently, scientists have put the device on standby during the observation sessions to ensure that it has enough fuel to send this information to the home. In last week's announcement, it was unclear whether the most recent sleep mode had been triggered voluntarily or whether it was the probe's response to a problem.
NASA has assembled a team of five Kepler experts for today 's press conference, including Paul Hertz, head of astrophysics division at NASA, and William Borucki, initiator of the Kepler project. and having since retired.
Padi Boyd, NASA project scientist for Kepler's scientific successor, Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey (TESS), will also participate in the event. TESS was launched in April and has already identified its first two exoplanet candidates.
The Kepler Space Telescope was launched in 2009 and since then it has been looking for exoplanets by observing the stars and measuring the tiny drops in brightness caused by planets weaving between the star and the telescope.
In 2014, after mechanical problems with the telescope, the instrument went from one area of the sky to one area to another in what the team dubbed the K2 mission. To date, during both missions, scientists have used Kepler data to identify more than 2,600 confirmed exoplanets.
Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her. @meghanbartels. follow us @Spacedotcom and Facebook. Original article on Space.com.
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