While NASA's Kepler space telescope may have gotten another lease on life with a new mission, it may now be in trouble. NASA has announced that the Kepler spacecraft entered Emergency Mode (EM) during contact on Thursday, April 7.
EM is actually the lowest operational mode for the spacecraft. It's also fuel intensive, which means that recovering Kepler from EM is a top priority for the Kepler team.
Kepler completed its first mission in 2012. It had detected nearly 5,000 exoplanets, 1,000 of which have been confirmed to actually be exoplanets. But after this mission ended, it soon began a new mission in 2014.
Kepler is in the midst of carrying out the K2 mission, which is the repurposed mission of the space telescope. The plan is to survey millions of stars toward the center of our Milky Way galaxy in order to search for distant stars' planetary outposts and exoplanets that wander between the stars and the telescope.
Most of today's planet-hunting techniques rely on the effect of gravity. Gravity of massive objects, such as stars and planets, produces a noticeable effect on other nearby objects that can then be measured. However, gravity also influences light and warps the direction of light passing close to massive objects. This can make gravity a lens so as to reveal exoplanets.
Currently, Kepler is about 75 million miles from Earth. This makes communication extremely slow, as it takes about 13 minutes for a signal to travel to the spacecraft and back.
Current records show that Kepler entered EM before mission operations began the maneuver to orient Kepler to point toward the center of the Milky Way to properly start the K2 mission.
The last regular contact with the spacecraft was on April 4. At that time, the spacecraft seemed to be functioning well with little or no issues. However, it seems as if something has now gone wrong.
NASA will be providing updates on the spacecraft as it becomes available. Currently, though, mission scientists are focusing on getting Kepler out of EM as quickly as possible and figuring out exactly what may have caused it to enter that mode in the first place.
