Thursday, May 5, 2016
Habitable 'Earth 2.0'? Space agency set to reveal Kepler's latest findings
Nasa will make an announcement at 1pm ET on Tuesday, May 10 ,Kepler has confirmed more than 1,000 planets outside our solar system.Recently went into emergency mode but engineers managed to fix probe.
Astronomers are getting closer to finding worlds that resemble our own planet.
Nasa’s Kepler mission has played a major role in achieving this, after confirming more than 1,000 planets outside our solar system.
Some of these planets are slightly larger than Earth and orbit in the habitable zones of their stars.
But it’s mission isn’t over yet. Nasa will make an announcement at 1pm ET on Tuesday, May 10 to reveal the planet hunters latest discoveries.
When Kepler was launched in March 2009, scientists did not know how common planets were outside our solar system.
Thanks to its treasure trove of discoveries, astronomers now believe there may be at least one planet orbiting every star in the sky.
Kepler completed its prime mission in 2012, and collected data for an additional year in an extended mission.
In 2014, the spacecraft began a new extended mission called K2.
K2 continues the search for exoplanets while introducing new research opportunities to study young stars, supernovae and other cosmic phenomena.
But it hasn't been without its challenges.
Last month, Nasa managed to bring its Kepler back online after losing touch with it.
Ground controllers discovered the problem right before they were going to point Kepler toward the center of the Milky Way as part of a new kind of planetary survey.
'Mission operations engineers have successfully recovered the Kepler spacecraft from Emergency Mode (EM),' the space agency said at the time.
'The mission has cancelled the spacecraft emergency, returning the Deep Space Network ground communications to normal scheduling.'
The Emergency Mode began approximately 14 hours before the planned maneuver to orient the spacecraft toward the center of the Milky Way for Campaign 9.
The team therefore ruled out the maneuver and the reaction wheels as possible causes of the EM event.
The vast 75 million-mile distance between Kepler and Earth make it all the harder to fix.
KEPLER'S HISTORY OF PROBLEMS
In 2012, Kepler lost use of the first of two failed gyroscopic reaction wheels.
Four wheels are used point the telescope in a specific direction, according to NASA, and in May of the following year, the second wheel broke.
After months of work, engineers were unable to restore them.
The Kepler telescope was reborn in 2014 as 'K2' with a clever strategy of pointing the telescope in the plane of Earth's orbit, the ecliptic, to stabilize the spacecraft.
The probe has been mining the cosmos for planets by searching for eclipses or 'transits,' as planets pass in front of their host stars and periodically block some of the starlight.
'Even at the speed of light, it takes 13 minutes for a signal to travel to the spacecraft and back,' mission manager Charlie Sobeck said in a weekend web update from Nasa's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
In 2012, Kepler lost use of the first of two failed gyroscopic reaction wheels.
Four wheels are used point the telescope in a specific direction, according to Nasa, and in May of the following year, the second wheel broke.
After months of work, engineers were unable to restore them.
The Kepler telescope was reborn in 2014 as 'K2' with a clever strategy of pointing the telescope in the plane of Earth's orbit, the ecliptic, to stabilize the spacecraft.
The probe has been mining the cosmos for planets by searching for eclipses or 'transits,' as planets pass in front of their host stars and periodically block some of the starlight.
Despite its history of breakdowns, Kepler has continued to gather data for Nasa.
Last year alone, the spacecraft discovered what scientists called Earth's 'closest twin' outside the solar system; rocks in the habitable zone of another star; a dimming pattern coming from a faraway star; and the first supernova to be seen wit visible light.
More than 1,000 of Kepler's detected 5,000 exoplanets have been confirmed to date, according to Nasa.
Kepler is named after the 17th century German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler.
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