NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is stable once again, after spending three tense days in emergency mode.
Last Thursday, Kepler had gone into emergency mode, after showing signs of turmoil that concerned NASA officials. Emergency mode, according to the agency, is a highly “fuel intensive” mode that conversely is the least operational. That meant the space telescope would not be able to search for habitable planets as it usually would. And while officials still aren’t sure why Kepler had been experiencing turmoil, the spacecraft was stable again as of Sunday, with its communication antenna again pointing toward Earth’s direction.
“The spacecraft is nearly 75 million miles from Earth, making the communication slow,” said Kepler mission manager Charlie Sobeck. “Even at the speed of light it takes 13 minutes for a signal to travel to the spacecraft and back.”
Currently, Kepler is undergoing a thorough, week-long health check, as scientists hope to determine if it is “healthy enough to return to science mode.” If so, this would soon mark the kickoff of the Campaign 9 mission.
“In this campaign, both K2 and astronomers at ground-based observatories on five continents will simultaneously monitor the same region of sky towards the center of our galaxy to search for small planets, such as the size of Earth, orbiting very far from their host star or, in some cases, orbiting no star at all,” said NASA, explaining Campaign 9 in a press statement.
The Kepler space telescope was launched by NASA in 2009 as a way for the agency to determine if there are any habitable planets in the universe. The telescope has also been tasked to find exoplanets, and had detected close to 5,000 of them in 2012, at the end of its first mission. Over a thousand of those potential exoplanets have since been confirmed, and Kepler then determines if these planets can host any kind of life.