This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of utilise.

Kepler

NASA'south Kepler Space Telescope is the spacecraft that simply won't quit. Despite a serial of setbacks in recent years, information technology continues to operate and return valuable data on potential exoplanets. That almost came to an stop last calendar month when the telescope cruel dorsum to emergency way after what appeared to exist a complete systems failure. NASA engineers worked diligently and managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

It all started in the wee hours of April 8th when Kepler mission manager Charlie Sobeck was awoken past a phone telephone call. The telescope was locked in "emergency mode" and would be dead shortly if NASA couldn't set it from millions of miles away. The longer the spacecraft is in emergency mode, the more fuel information technology burns, and it's orbiting the sunday more than 70 million miles away from Globe. In that location won't exist any refueling missions.

The failure occurred when Kepler was being reoriented every bit function of its K2 mission. This was undertaken after the 2nd of its iv reaction wheels failed in 2013. With but two wheels, the telescope couldn't remain pointed at target stars to watch for signs of exoplanets. Yet, the K2 mission uses the two remaining wheels to residuum the arts and crafts against the force of the solar current of air to go along it stable for limited observations of stellar phenomena and potential exoplanets. However, instead of nudging itself into a different orientation for these observations, the telescope was one footstep abroad from total shutdown.

Kepler several operational modes including normal, safe style, and emergency mode. If something goes wrong, Kepler would usually kick over to safe mode, but emergency mode happens when the satellite thinks all of its instruments have failed. While in emergency fashion, it shuts down the master computers and fires the thrusters to keep the solar panels pointed at the sun. This ensures NASA will exist able to contact the spacecraft, simply fourth dimension (and fuel) is extremely limited.

NASA's K2 balancing act

NASA's K2 balancing act.

The kickoff pace in saving Kepler was to go in contact with it. NASA was able to declare a "space emergency" to gain immediate priority access to the Deep Infinite Network of communications antennas located effectually the world. Kepler'south emergency fill-in communications array was just pointed back at Earth every few hours, so it took three days to figure out what had happened. Kepler reported that its thrusters, primary communication hardware, and two remaining reaction wheels had all failed. NASA wasn't buying it. The odds of all those systems failing simultaneously were slim.

NASA was able to remotely terminate the spinning, offering consistent communication. Then, they rebooted the telescope. Sure enough, the failed systems came back online without the false alarms. NASA doesn't know what caused the telescope to think all those systems had failed, simply they managed to gear up the problem earlier all the fuel was wearied. It did still fire through quite a lot, though. NASA is yet working to approximate the fuel levels, just it's likely part of the K2 mission will have to be cutting short.