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The Kepler Space Telescope runs empty, and there is no no room to fill 94 million miles of Earth.
Charlie Sobeck, an engineer for the Kepler mission, announced in a March 2018 update that the end is near for the nine-year-old deep space observatory. "At this rate, the sturdy spaceship can reach its finish line in a way that we will consider a wonderful success," he wrote. "With nary a gas station to be found in deep space, the spacecraft will run out of fuel.We expect to reach that moment in a few months."
Jump from the # Before four months on July 6, 2018, NASA's Kepler equips the spacecraft in hibernation mode preparatory to what might be its final scientific data download. Indications earlier in the week that the fuel tank was very low led to a change of status.
Kepler will remain in hibernation mode, which NASA qualifies as state of use without fuel, until August 2, when the craft will be awake and charged to direct its antenna to the Earth. Over the next four days, Kepler will download the data during the scheduled time of the Deep Space Network. Assuming repositioning and data transmission is successful, Kelper will pick up his observations with all the remaining fuel.
Kepler was launched on March 6, 2009, on what was originally envisioned as a three-and-a-half-year mission. The spacecraft has been guided into a solar orbit, dragging the earth as it turns around the sun, on a quest to find planets the size of the Earth orbiting distant stars
The Kepler Telescope Can not to actually see these distant planets. On the contrary, he looks for variations of light when a planet passes in front of its star, creating a tiny pulsation. Repeated observations can detect the size and orbit of the planet.
Kepler has discovered hundreds of exoplanets in the past nine years. His mission could end in 2013 when a reaction wheel on the spacecraft will break, rendering it unable to maintain its position relative to the Earth.
The new Kepler mission, called K2, starts using the sun's pressure to maintain its orientation. Like the direction in the current on a river, the new technique allows the telescope to shift its field of view for a new observation every three months. The team initially estimated that spacecraft could conduct ten of these "campaigns" before completing its mission, but it is already at its 17.
The fuel used by Kepler is hydropine monopropellant , as Sobeck explained in a podcast on the mission. "It's just a fluid that, when it goes through thrusters, ignites and provides a boost," he said. "It's under pressure in the tank, and that's what propels it into the thrusters, into the fuel lines as if you had your lines in your car."
One of the challenges is to recover the data already stored on the recorder. The last drops of fuel will be used to rotate the spacecraft so that its parabolic is pointed towards the Earth. "The data we have spent so much time and effort to get, we want to get it to land," Sobeck said. "It does not help us if she lives on the spaceship forever … we have to send her to the ground."
Although this is the end of Kepler, a new planetary hunter should take flight later this spring. TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey) will be launched aboard a SpaceX rocket during a mission to study the 200,000 brightest stars closest to the sun to find exoplanets
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