sic transit gloria kepler?
May. 15th, 2013 04:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
twoeleventhe nice folks at JPL are saying that NASA's kepler planet-hunting telescope is lightly busted. looks like it's lost a second reaction wheel. it needs three to stay pointed in one direction, it was launched with four, one had failed previously, so it's left with two.
JPL is gonna see if they can fix one of the two broken ones by selective brute force -- trying to get them spinning again by commanding the motors to turn forwards and backwards in alternation, for example -- and then look at trying to manage with just two reaction wheels and some other hack to get stable enough pointing to keep looking for planets. if one of those works, kepler is back in business. otherwise, well, there's plenty of data already collected that needs to be analyzed.
(teleconference going on now; will add a link to the recording/transcript when it's available.)
JPL is gonna see if they can fix one of the two broken ones by selective brute force -- trying to get them spinning again by commanding the motors to turn forwards and backwards in alternation, for example -- and then look at trying to manage with just two reaction wheels and some other hack to get stable enough pointing to keep looking for planets. if one of those works, kepler is back in business. otherwise, well, there's plenty of data already collected that needs to be analyzed.
(teleconference going on now; will add a link to the recording/transcript when it's available.)