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Artist illustration of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which has discovered more than 2,650 exoplanets to date. Kepler was awakened from his last sleep and began a new series of observations, NASA officials wrote on September 5, 2018.
Credit: W Stenzel / NASA Ames
The Kepler roller coaster ride continues.
The NASA Kepler Space Telescope, which has discovered more than 2,650 alien planets to date, has awakened from a new sleep and resumed making scientific observations, announced today. the officials of the agency (5 September).
The $ 600 million Kepler mission, launched in March 2009, was designed to determine how similar Earth-like planets are around the galaxy. The spacecraft initially studied more than 150,000 stars simultaneously, searching for tiny troughs due to the passage of planets in orbit on the faces of these stars. [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]
This work was completed in May 2013, after the failure of the second of Kepler's four-wheel steering retentive reaction and the loss of ultra-precise pointing ability of the craft space. Members of the mission team however found a way to stabilize Kepler using sunlight pressure and the instrument began a new mission called K2 in 2014. During K2, Kepler is studying various cosmic objects and events on a series of 80-day campaigns. . "
In early July of this year, mission team members put Kepler in a hibernation state to ensure that the telescope would have enough fuel to reorient itself to Earth. in early August and radiant windows are limited, NASA spacecraft must share the Deep Space Network, a radio telescope system around the world.)
Kepler got all the data from the 18 campaign successfully – and then went back to sleep, wrote the mission team members in an update on August 24th.
Which brings us to the news of today. Kepler woke up again, launching campaign 19 of his K2 mission on August 29th. But the future of the spacecraft is still unclear, NASA officials said.
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"After being awakened from standby mode, the spacecraft configuration was changed due to the unusual behavior of one of the thrusters," they wrote in today's update. # 39; hui. "Preliminary indications indicate that the telescope's pointing performance may be somewhat degraded.It is still unclear how much fuel remains, NASA continues to monitor the health and performance of the spacecraft."
The current count of Kepler exoplanets is 2,652, of which 325 were discovered during K2. This total represents about 70% of all known foreign worlds. And Kepler's finds will continue to arrive even after the spacecraft ceases operations (whenever possible); More than 2700 Kepler "candidate" planets have yet to be controlled by observations or follow-up analyzes.
Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @ michaeldwall and Google+. follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com.
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