NASA's Kepler telescope on the planet, in search of planets, has trouble seeing directly

NASA's Kepler exoplanet champion Telescope's reign is expected to end this month, according to an update from the agency published yesterday (28 September).

Indeed, two systems disrupt the aging of the telescope: new data show that the instrument is struggling to point precisely in the sky, even if it is still out of fuel, according to the release of the telescope. agency.

The team behind Kepler has turned off the instrument temporarily and will wake it on October 10, when it will send its next batch of data to Earth. At this point, according to NASA, there is no way to know if this process will be successful. If that is the case, they will hand over the telescope to the data collection, trying to get the most out of the machine.

The telescope has been running out of fuel for six months now. The spacecraft does not carry a precise gauge, which prevents scientists from accurately estimating the amount of juice it has left and its duration.

And the loss of Kepler's pointing accuracy is also that the latest development of an endless struggle: in 2013, the second of four wheels that was holding the telescope staring at the same sky for four years. Is broken. NASA gave a second life to the instrument as a K2 mission, which looks at a given region for a few months and then moves on to a new one.

Between the two missions, the instrument has identified more than 2,600 planets, accounting for two-thirds of the total discoveries of exoplanets made by scientists. In both cases, the instrument has measured the brightness of different stars over time, looking for the slight repetitive slight drops in brightness caused by the passage of a planet between the telescope and the star.

Its successor mission, Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or TESS, has already identified its first two candidate exoplanets, and scientists hope that it will have 10,000 in its first two years of work.

Email Meghan Bartels at [email protected] or follow her. @meghanbartels. follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+ Original article on Space.com.