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Kepler Space Telescope's Planet-Hunting Days May Be Numbered, NASA Announces
By ALICIA CHANG
The Huffington Post
5-15-13
LOS ANGELES — NASA's planet-hunting Kepler telescope is broken, potentially jeopardizing the search for other worlds where life could exist outside our solar system.
If engineers can't find a fix, the failure could mean an end to the $600 million mission's search, although the space agency wasn't ready to call it quits Wednesday. The telescope has discovered scores of planets but only two so far are the best candidates for habitable planets.
"I wouldn't call Kepler down-and-out just yet," said NASA sciences chief John Grunsfeld.
NASA said the spacecraft lost the second of four wheels that control its orientation in space. With only two working wheels left, it can't point at stars with the same precision.
In orbit around the sun, 40 million miles from Earth, Kepler is too far away to send astronauts on a repair mission like the way Grunsfeld and others fixed a mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope. Over the next several weeks, engineers on the ground will try to restart Kepler's faulty wheel or find a workaround. The telescope could be used for other purposes even if it can no longer track down planets. . . .
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See Also:
Kepler Discovers a System of Tiny Planets | SPACE NEWS
Has Kepler Found Ideal SETI-target Planets?
Kepler Space Telescope Spots 41 New Exoplanets
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