WASHINGTON, May 15 (RIA Novosti) - NASA’s highly successful Kepler space telescope has suffered a technical failure that could mean an end to its planet-hunting days, the US space agency said Wednesday.
Engineers at NASA discovered during weekly communication with the spacecraft that Kepler had gone into “thruster-controlled safe mode” because of the glitch, a spokeswoman said.
The US space agency is still trying to pin down what caused the malfunction, which was discovered Tuesday.
Indications are that one of Kepler’s reaction wheels, which help to control the direction the spacecraft is facing as it scans space for new planets, failed, Michele Johnson, public affairs officer at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, told RIA Novosti.
“When the reaction wheels aren’t working, the thrusters fire to keep the spacecraft pointed. It’s called thruster-controlled safe mode,” Johnson said.
Kepler was scheduled to end its mission last year but was still functioning and sending data back to earth as recently as a few days ago.
Last month, NASA announced that Kepler’s space-peering telescope discovered seven new planets, including two that are orbiting in the zone “between fire and ice” that could sustain life.
NASA has not determined what it will do with Kepler if the glitch cannot be put right, Johnson said.
“The mood here is quite reflective but everyone is ecstatic with what Kepler has produced and what we’ve learned from Kepler and the questions it’s triggered for more missions,” she said, adding that scientists will be busy for years, analyzing the data that Kepler was sending back to Earth, up until a few days ago.
