Equipment Failure May Cut Kepler Mission Short 76
HyperbolicParabaloid writes "According to the New York Times, an equipment failure on the Kepler spacecraft may mean the end of its planet-hunting mission. One of the reaction wheels that maintains the craft's orientation — critical to long-exposure imaging — has failed. 'In January engineers noticed that one of the reaction wheels that keep the spacecraft pointed was experiencing too much friction. They shut the spacecraft down for a couple of weeks to give it a rest, in the hopes that the wheel’s lubricant would spread out and solve the problem. But when they turned it back on, the friction was still there. Until now, the problem had not interfered with observations, which are scheduled to go on until at least 2016. Kepler was launched with four reaction wheels, but one failed last year after showing signs of erratic friction. Three wheels are required to keep Kepler properly and precisely aimed. Loss of the wheel has robbed it of the ability to detect Earth-size planets, although project managers hope to remedy the situation. The odds, astronomers said, are less than 50-50.'"
Re:so much for... (Score:5, Interesting)
So we, as a species, should stop looking towards the stars and keep our noses to the ground and dig, dig until we build utopia on planet Earth? Somehow I do not think that is a long-term survival prospect for our species.
[insert link to graph showing NASA's budget as compared to DoD budget and other government agencies' budgets].
Re:Primary mission already over (Score:5, Interesting)
'It's the extended mission (to 2016) that may be cut short. The primary mission is already over, in 2012' - this is true, and somewhat false.
One of the things that was discovered early on was that the sun was not a sun-like star.
It is unusually quiet - with little variation in brightness. Most of the population of stars observed by Kepler turn out to be lots noisier.
This unfortunately made the primary mission - which was to detect earth like planets in earth like orbits - not achievable in the original timescale.
With an extended mission, you can dig through more data, and get enough signal from multiple planet crossings to bring it up out of the noise, getting you back to where you would have been had the original mission assumptions been correct.
Unfortunately, the wheel failure seems to have constrained this.
At best the degraded pointing mode they may end up in will have much more noise in the signal, making it much less useful for many purposes.
(It will likely still be able to detect very large far out planets)
Another unfortunate fact is that the data from the cameras is very 'cooked' onboard - most of the data is thrown away automatically. This would make doing clever things to fix the problem in software on the returned data hard. How flexible the on-craft pipeline is is an interesting question.