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kepler

By all rights, NASA's Kepler spacecraft should have stopped working long ago. The observatory launched in 2009 with the aim of finding out how mutual exoplanets are throughout the universe. It turns out: very common. Mechanical failures forced NASA to change Kepler's mission profile, but information technology still kept working until a few months agone. NASA was unsure if Kepler could go on, but the spacecraft merely woke up to brainstorm a new observational entrada.

Kepler uses the transit method to discover exoplanets. That means it has to sentry vast swaths of the sky for weeks in club to runway small-scale lite dips that could indicate an exoplanet passing in front of its host star. That became much more difficult in 2022 when a second of four reaction wheels failed in the spacecraft. At that point, Kepler could no longer maintain its orientation to point at the same area over fourth dimension.

Since 2022, Kepler has been engaged in its secondary "K2" mission. This allows NASA to balance Kepler for several weeks a few times per twelvemonth using the remaining reaction wheels and pressure from the solar air current. The original Kepler mission identified 2,244 candidate exoplanets with ii,327 of them confirmed. Kepler's K2 phase resulted in 479 candidates exoplanets and 323 confirmed. Together, that's most of the roughly four,000 known exoplanets.

This function of the mission doesn't require fuel, but Kepler needs to apply its thrusters to orient its antenna toward Earth for beaming data back. NASA placed the telescope into hibernation style over the summer to ensure information technology would accept enough fuel left to send back data from its 18th observation. NASA got all the data back belatedly last month and started a new observational campaign on August 29th.

How to use sunlight (photon pressure) as Kepler's third reaction wheel

NASA originally simply expected 10 campaigns in K2, but there's no fuel estimate on the spacecraft. Engineers are merely estimating what's left in the tank based on past usage. It's possible Kepler won't have enough fuel to send dorsum the data information technology's currently collecting in the 19th entrada, simply NASA isn't giving up.

In the most recent mission update, NASA reports that one of Kepler'south thrusters isn't working correctly, and so its ability to reorient could exist limited. NASA says information technology will continue monitoring the spacecraft throughout the current campaign. Even if Kepler can't manage some other total campaign, the agency's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) is ready to pick upwardly where it left off.

Now read: Astronomers Spot Near 80 Exoplanets in Record Time, How Infinite Exploration Has Evolved Over the Years, and NASA's New Planet-Hunting Spacecraft Launches on Monday