NASA’s Kepler space telescope has had a rough time of it, what with losing control of two of its control wheels and precariously balancing on nothing but sunlight to keep itself pointed in the right direction to hunt for exoplanets, but even that was thrown into jeopardy about two weeks back when the craft was discovered in emergency mode. Contact was later reestablished, and now it’s finally on to find even more alien worlds.
The process of getting the distant space probe (Kepler tags along Earth’s orbit around the sun, but about 75 million miles behind us) back into “science mode”—NASA’s words, not mine, though I’d gladly have written them myself—began Tuesday, with aiming instructions being sent from Earth. As of 8:30AM PDT today, the telescope is officially hunting for more exoplanets for us to write a billion more blog posts about.
As for what caused the malfunction, they’re still not really sure, but they’ll continue looking into it as the main mission moves on. A statement from the space agency today read, “The cause of the anomaly, first reported on April 8, remains under investigation. The nature of the problem has indications of a transient event, which triggered a barrage of false alarms that eventually overwhelmed the system, placing Kepler in Emergency Mode. Power-cycling the onboard computers and subsystems appears to have cleared the problem.”
In other words, they went with the trusty “turn it off and back on again and see what happens” approach, and that did the trick for reasons unknown, even though everyone would still really like an explanation. Working at NASA sounds a lot more like being your family’s go-to tech support than I would’ve anticipated.
(via Gizmodo, image via NASA/JPL-Caltech/Wendy Stenzel)
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