NASA formulated plans and exerted effort to revive hoping that they can continue in their mission that has modernized in their search for “Earth-like planets orbiting other stars”.
Introduced in March 7, 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope which was named after Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler has already identified 3,000 and more possible Martian planets. However, the mission idled last May 7, 2013 when two of Kepler’s four reaction wheels stopped working, which aborted the mission, thus, immobilizing the gathering of science data.
Since then, Kepler team never stopped looking for ways to fix the reaction wheels.
Kepler mission manager Roger Hunter of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, wrote in an update in July 3, “The engineering team has devised initial tests for the recovery attempt and is checking them on the spacecraft test bed at Ball Aerospace Facility in Boulder, Colorado. The team anticipates that exploratory commanding of Kepler’s reaction wheels will commence mid-to-late July.”
Kepler Team stressed, “There’s no assurance that the recovery attempt will work. If at least one of the two failed wheels cannot be brought back to life, the spacecraft will almost certainly be tasked with a new mission, probably one that incorporates more of a scanning approach (as opposed to Kepler's original point-and-stare operations).”
The $600 million worth of Kepler mission has already discovered 3,277 possible Martial planets up to this date. Thirty-four of them were confirmed by follow-up observations. Mission scientists anticipate that at least 90 percent ends up being the real deal, though.
Kepler Spacecraft is specifically designed to aid astronomers in determining the frequency of “Earth-like planets” all throughout the Milky Way galaxy.
The spacecraft has already outlasted its planned lifetime, which is 3.5 years, and mission scientists say whether or not the reaction wheels get fixed, they have sufficient data to keep them busy for a couple of years or so.
However, greater than projected noise in the spacecraft and stars means additional time will be required to accomplish all missions. So let’s cross our fingers in the hope of Kepler Spacecraft’s revival.
