NASA’s storied Kepler Space Telescope—the craft which has discovered thousands of exoplanets since its launch in 2009—is entering the retirement phase of its lifespan. NASA announced on Friday that Kepler staff had “received an indication that the spacecraft fuel tank is running very low” and “placed the spacecraft in a hibernation-like state in preparation to download the science data collected in its latest observation campaign.”
According to NASA, Kepler staff have put the craft into hibernation mode until August, when the plan to turn it back on and use NASA’s Deep Space Network to transfer mission data back to Earth. If that is successful, they plan to start a 19th observation campaign with the remaining fuel.
https://gizmodo.com/nasas-kepler-space-telescope-is-running-out-of-fuel-and-1827419257
basically its going to be run till it dies but there's a replacement up already with the TESS satellite though. a bolder mission that would use a second vehicle as a sun shade has gotten hung up in the beurocracy and may get scrapped given how poorly moonshots like the SLS and James Webb have been going.
It just makes you think, if thats what we could build in 2009, who knows what we'll send up there next.
Here's to hoping it'll last until JWST is up.
Shame it's had so many problems though, hell Hubble is a dinosaur but still in operation.
hubble is like 5 times its size and is in low earth orbit under the earth's magnetic field, its also been upgraded and changed up. hubble is running out of time itself though since there doesn't seem to be any good way to service it any time soon, if something breaks I guess we'll keep it up till we can finally fix it
Oh I know that Kepler is totally out of service range, and all the gyro problems and radiation glitches its has.
I'm just stating that it'd be nice to atleast still have one eye in the sky until JWST.
its replacement has already been launched and is being calibrated right now
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.