The first find announced in December was a single planet in a nine-day orbit around a K star - a star that is about two-thirds the size of the sun but about the same age and composition. Since K2 began last year, it's already proving its worth with two significant discoveries. "K2 from today could operate for another three or four years." We won't be able to do these maneuvers anymore," Howell said. "Once the fuel runs out even if all the hardware is still working great, we will be done.
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Unlike the first mission, K2 must use fuel to reorient telescope so that it points to Earth and allows scientists to download data and upload commands for it to go and look at the next field.
K2 also faces other limitations, namely that will eventually it will run out of fuel. Instead, K2 only looks at "brighter and closer stars, things where we can do a lot of follow up study and actually start to characterize the planets we find." K2 "will never be the same," he added, and never find as many planets because it can't match the breadth of Kepler which monitored 150,000 stars every 30 minutes for four years. We just march along the band in the sky looking at one field for three months and then another field for about three months." "All the fields along this band in the sky. "Instead of being able to point at a field for four years, we can only look at a given field for 85 days," Howell said. Stargazers are familiar with the trajectory, which passes through the 12 constellations of the Zodiac. It scans what is known as the ecliptic, which is the path the sun appears to take through the sky as a result of the Earth's revolution. Because its solar panels have to be directed toward the sun in a symmetrical way to achieve balance, the telescope searches a much more limited area. The mission was relaunched in May 2014 under the name K2 and will pick up where the scope left off.īut K2 won't have the same reach as the original Kepler. Thus rebooted, the second act of Kepler was born. We can now balance the telescope again and point it pretty specifically in one direction." "That provided enough of a force and then we take the other two reaction wheels and kind of push against that force. "It turns out we used the light from the sun pushing against the solar panels," Howell said. NASA scientists teamed up with colleagues at Ball Aerospace,which built the spacecraft, to use the two reaction wheels that still worked and go in search of a "third force to kind of balance those two." "They were giving it last rites and all kinds of things like that." Kepler's imagined worlds 11 photosīut Howell and others were not ready to abandon the telescope. "We had very prominent members of our own science team that were saying it's dead, too bad," Steve Howell, project scientist, NASA K2 Mission, told CBS News. With no way to fix the wheels, the mission appeared to be over. The wheels, which operate like gyroscopes, allowed the telescope to aim and lock on a target. A hardware glitch in 2012 and a second one a year later left two of its four spinning reaction wheels inoperable.
After completing its primary mission in 2012, NASA extended its life by four years hoping to build on its early success.īut things started to go wrong almost immediately. Launched in 2009, the famous space telescope tasked with finding Earth-like planets has identified more than 1,000 exoplanets among 4,175 candidates it's discovered.