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Artist illustration of NASA's Kepler Space Telescope in search of exoplanets.
Credit: NASA
Kepler's whip for waking continues.
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which has discovered more than 2,650 extraterrestrial planets so far, has come out of another sleep yet sunny Thursday (Oct. 11), agency officials said.
Kepler has been running out of fuel for a while. As a result, mission team members slept the spacecraft several times over the last few months to ensure that there was enough propulsion for Kepler to move to Earth and transmit his last batches. of data at home. [Gallery: A World of Kepler Planets]
Such relays are only possible during certain windows. The Kepler team relies on NASA's Deep Space network to capture incoming data and has to share this system of large satellite dishes with other agency missions.
The Kepler mission, valued at $ 600 million, was launched in March 2009. Initially, the spacecraft had projected more than 150,000 stars simultaneously, watching for low light dips that could indicate the passage of planets orbit around the face of these stars.
In May 2013, Kepler's second of four Kepler's Keystone-keeping reaction wheels failed, thus ending the initial mission of the observatory. But Kepler's maneuvers found a way to stabilize the spacecraft by using the remaining wheels and the sun's pressure, and Kepler quickly embarked on a longer mission called K2.
During K2, Kepler searched for exoplanets and observed various other objects and phenomena during changing campaigns of 80 days. Kepler started collecting data for the last campaign, Campaign 19, on August 29th. But the mission team fell asleep at the observatory less than a month after finding that Kepler's pointing ability had deteriorated.
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"We are still watching the safety of the spacecraft while working on downloading the data from Campaign 19," NASA officials wrote in an update today (October 12).
Refueling Kepler is not an option. The observatory – which is responsible for about 70% of all exoplanet discoveries to date – revolves around the sun and is millions of miles from the Earth.
Mike Wall's book on the search for extraterrestrial life, "Over there" will be published on November 13 by Grand Central Publishing. Follow him on Twitter @michaeldwall. follow us @Spacedotcom or Facebook. Originally published on Space.com.
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