Kepler Planet-Hunting Telescope in Peril

Kepler is down, NASA says. But it's not out just yet.

The prize planet-hunting telescope, which has discovered more than 27000 planet candidates and 130 confirmed new planets since it began scanning the stars in 2009, went into safe mode on Sunday. Kepler scientists found out when they tried to reach the telescope Tuesday night. They saw that reaction wheel number 4, one of the four instruments in charge of precisely aiming Kepler at its targets, was not spinning, team leaders told reporters in a teleconference this afternoon. "This is indicative of an internal failure in the wheel," said Charles Sobeck, deputy project manager.

According to John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA, the problem is that Kepler needs at least three of its four wheels online to aim itself properly, and wheel number 2 went down last year. Without wheel number 4, Kepler isn't exactly dead in space, but it can't resume its scientific mission.

For now, NASA can use thrusters to steady the telescope for at least a month or two, and put it indefinitely into a mode called point rest state?"It's an oasis where we park it while we decide what to do next," Sobeck said. First, they'll jiggle the wheel and move it back and forth to try to get it unstuck. If that doesn't work, they could try to revive wheel number 2. While number 4 isn't moving at all, 2 retained some movement when NASA shut it down last year. The Kepler team said it could be months before they've exhausted their options.

If both wheels are indeed stuck and Kepler is left with just two, it won't be hunting for new planets. But even so, there's plenty of work left to do. William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator, says there's a backlog of at least two years' worth of Kepler data to deal with. For one thing, most of Kepler's finds are still planet candidates at this point, meaning other scientists need to confirm that Kepler wasn't seeing some anomaly such as a small star passing in front of a larger one.

And it's not out of the question that telescope, most of which is still operational, could live on doing other kinds of astronomy. But the NASA leaders assembled today refused to speculate as to what that might entail. For now they heaped praise on the Kepler mission, just in case it truly has met its end after four years.

"The mission itself has been spectacularly successful," Sobeck said. And Paul Hertz, astrophysics director, reminded listeners that Kepler is NASA's first planet-hunter, not its last. The TESS observatory coming in 2017 should find half a million candidates and search them for signs of possible life.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/kepler-planet-hunting-telescope-in-peril-15476165?src=rss

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