14 DAY TRIAL // Officials at the American space agency announce that the Kepler Mission experienced a glitch earlier this week, when the orbital telescope switched to the wrong guidance system while attempting to conduct its trademark investigations of distant stars.
The observatory was supposed to switch to its finepoint guidance system, which allows it to focus its observations power to specific stars located very far away. Something went wrong as the explorer tried to do so.
According to mission controllers, the instrument in fact switched to its coarse guidance system, which allows it to compute its position based on the position of a number of reference stars.
Needless to say, that second guidance system is not nearly as efficient in targeting specific objects, which renders the telescope useless for the type of science it was designed to conduct.
Following the malfunction, Kepler lost an estimated 13 hours of observations, which is not that long considering that many spacecraft lose months following glitches, or sometimes never recover at all.
The issue was detected by mission controllers on Monday, December 13, as they were attempting to perform a scheduled check-in with the observatory. Diagnostic tools immediately found the error.
Precisely what caused the malfunction is still a matter of of debate among experts. “They determined that Kepler failed to transition properly from coarse point to finepoint attitude after a pre-planned momentum wheel de-saturation,” NASA says in a press release.
The de-saturation process is a regular maneuver that the telescope has to undergo regularly in order to remain in its observations orbit, and keep its vantage point.
“The project team was able to recover the spacecraft to finepoint relatively quickly. Only 13 hours of science data collection were interrupted by this anomaly,” the NASA announcement explains.
This particular telescope is very important for the agency, because it's the first-ever to be dedicated exclusively to identifying Earth-analog planets around distant stars.
Thus far, the international astronomical community has discovered more than 500 stars in 200 years, but Kepler managed to identify no less than 700 candidates since being launched in May 2009.
Given that the instrument's overall validation rate is more than 50 percent, we could see at least 350 exoplanets being added to the count by this instrument alone within the next couple of years.
NASA will further augment its capabilities in 2014, when the James Webb Space Telescope is expected to launch. The JWST will investigate Kepler targets with amazing detail, and confirm whether they are indeed exoplanets, Space reports.