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Ground controllers transmitted the latest commands to NASA's Kepler telescope, shutting down the spacecraft's transmitters and disabling the machine's automatic salvage software after the planet's hunting observatory's fuel outage. last month.
The latest signals sent to Kepler were broadcast from a control center at the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory of Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP, through the University's Deep Space Network. NASA, Thursday night.
The engineers ordered Kepler to turn off his radio transmitters, a standard procedure when disabling a space mission to ensure that stray signals do not interfere with communications using the same frequencies or similar frequencies. The controls also prevented Kepler's computer from trying to reignite the transmitters and contact the Earth.
"Because the spacecraft is spinning slowly, the Kepler team had to carefully timed the controls so that the instructions reach the spacecraft during the viable communication periods," NASA announced Friday. "The team will monitor the spacecraft to make sure the controls have worked well."
NASA announced Oct. 30 that Kepler was running out of fuel and no longer had the pointing stability needed to search for planets around other stars.
Launched in 2009, Kepler bypasses the sun about 151 million kilometers from the Earth. On his current journey, Kepler flies a little farther from the sun than the Earth and circles the sun a little more slowly than the Earth.
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The spacecraft will move away from Earth in the next few decades, before the Earth begins to recover. In 2060, Kepler will return to the vicinity of the Earth – but well outside the orbit of the moon – and the gravity of the planet will drive the telescope into an orbit a little closer to the sun and moving faster than the Earth.
The reverse will occur in 2117, when Kepler and Earth converge again and gravity will push the probe into the slowest and slowest orbit. According to NASA, this trend is expected to continue in the near future.
At the same time, scientists continue to analyze data collected during Kepler's $ 692 million nine-year mission.
Kepler collected its latest scientific observations in September, ending an analysis of more than 530,000 stars and returning 678 gigabytes of data. Kepler's discoveries have also helped astronomers write nearly 3,000 scientific papers, a number that will continue to climb.
Astronomers using the data collected by Kepler have confirmed the existence of 2,681 planets orbiting other stars, with 2,899 other planets under development that could be confirmed by follow-up observations.
"We have found some potentially rocky planets around some of these bright stars. These are now the main targets of current and future telescopes. We can see what they are made of, how they are formed and what their atmosphere looks like. Said Jessie Dotson, Kepler project scientist at Ames.
"Although we have ceased our spacecraft operations, the scientific results of Kepler's data will continue in the years to come," she said.
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Follow Stephen Clark on Twitter: @ StephenClark1.
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