NASA’s Planet Hunting Spacecraft Kepler In State Of Emergency

Washington DC: NASA scientists are scrambling to save the planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft after it slipped into a state of emergency.

The ageing spacecraft, which has detected almost 5,000 planets, is around 75 million miles away from Earth. Scientists discovered that it had entered emergency mode at some point last week. The last time they made normal contact with it was April 4, when there were no signs of any problems, everything seemed normal then.

Ground controllers discovered the problem Thursday, right before they were going to point Kepler toward the centre of the Milky Way as part of a new kind of planetary survey. Kepler was going to join ground observatories in surveying millions of stars in the heart of our galaxy, in hopes of finding planets far from their suns, like our own outer planets, as well as stray planets that might be wandering between stars.

The emergency mode means that it is now at its “lowest operational level” and is burning through a huge amount of fuel. The future of the spacecraft, currently our best chance of finding habitable planets outside our solar system, now hangs in the balance.

Launched in 2009, Kepler completed its primary mission in 2012. Despite repeated breakdowns, Kepler kept going on an extended mission dubbed K2 — until now. The vast distance between Kepler and Earth makes it all the harder to fix. From 75 million miles away, signals would take 13 minutes to go back and forth, according to mission manager Charlie Sobeck at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

More than 1,000 of Kepler’s detected 5,000 exoplanets have been confirmed to date, according to NASA. Over the past few months it has found the most Earth-like Exoplanet to date and recorded the first shockwave coming off a supernova.

Kepler is named after the 17th century German astronomer and mathematician Johannes Kepler.