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NASA was forced to plan the inevitable death of the Kepler Space Telescope, a hunter of exoplanets, a few weeks ago. The spacecraft, which had already discovered thousands of new planets, was running out of fuel and could not continue its scientific observations. NASA finally finally wished good night to his trusty telescope.
In a new post, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory explains what it should do to officially send Kepler to the pasture. Believe it or not, it's a little more complicated than just switching a switch.
According to the JPL, the empty fuel tank of the spacecraft would prevent it from doing more scientific work, but it still needed a set of controls to make sure the telescope would not wake up. Here's how it happened:
Kepler's team disabled security modes that inadvertently reset systems and shut down communications by shutting down transmitters. As the spacecraft slowly rotates, the Kepler team had to carefully time the controls for the instructions to reach the spacecraft during viable communication periods. The team will monitor the spacecraft to ensure that the controls have worked well. The probe is now drifting in a safe orbit around the Sun, 94 million kilometers from the Earth.
The Kepler retreat is a little disappointing. The spaceship has made so many incredible discoveries that it's hard to accept that its incredible race is over. NASA clearly has the same feeling and produced a beautiful video retrospective to conclude.
This obviously does not mean the end of NASA's efforts to search for exoplanets. New equipment such as the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to make even more fantastic discoveries in the not-too-distant future.
Image Source: NASA
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