NASA reports Kepler satellite enters Emergency Mode

A spacecraft emergency has been declared by the Kepler Mission, as mission engineers have discovered that the Kepler spacecraft is in Emergency Mode (EM).

As reported by NASA, the startling find was made during a scheduled contact with the spacecraft on April 7. Emergency Mode is Kepler’s lowest operational mode and uses up large amounts of fuel. The team behind the Kepler Mission is now racing to recover from EM.

Declaring a spacecraft emergency helps them to fix the problem even faster, as it grants them priority access to ground-based communications at NASA’s Deep Space Network. Of course, communication with Kepler itself isn’t easy—being almost 75 million miles (roughly 121 million kilometers) from Earth, it takes 13 minutes for signals to reach the craft and return to Earth—a delay that’s acceptable during normal operations, but potentially costly while trying to save it.

Kepler itself is a space observatory that was launched in 2009 with the goal of detecting Earth-like planets. It is equipped with a photometer that detects planets during transits with the stars they orbit– thereby dimming the light that Kepler “sees” from the stars. (Incidentally, this is how aliens could find our planet.)

By the end of its prime mission in 2012, it had detected nearly 5,000 exoplanets. In 2014, it was given a new mission titled K2, in which it searches for more exoplanets while studying other astronomical objects, like supernovae. It has continued to find more potential life-bearing planets, including 234 new candidates in 2014.

Houston, we have a problem

So far, results indicate that Kepler went into Emergency Mode about three days ago; it is unclear why this happened. Last time the mission engineers checked in on the spacecraft was April 4^th, and it was operating normally at the time. NASA has promised updates in regards to its condition as soon as they become available.

All in all, the past two weeks haven’t been great for space enthusiasts—because besides Kepler, it was recently discovered that a new Japanese satellite, Hitomi, which has an unprecedented potential to make breakthroughs in our understanding of the universe, is tumbling out of control. As of yet, its engineers have not been able to recover it, either.

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Image credit: NASA

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