Posted on 04/11/2016 6:45:54 PM PDT by sparklite2
NASA engineers have successfully recovered the Kepler spacecraft from emergency mode, the space agency announced Monday.
The spacecraft, which is nearly 75 million miles away and responsible for detecting nearly 5,000 planets outside our solar system — slipped into emergency mode sometime last week. The last regular contact was April 4.
The mission has now cancelled the spacecraft emergency, which was Kepler’s first during its seven years in space.
“On Sunday morning, the spacecraft reached a stable state with the communication antenna pointed toward Earth, enabling telemetry and historical event data to be downloaded to the ground,” explained Charlie Sobeck, Kepler and K2 mission manager at NASA's Ames Research Center, in a statement. “The spacecraft is operating in its lowest fuel-burn mode.”
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I don’t envy the team stress levels experienced since last week.
Even more than what caused the problem, I’d love to know how Kepler reoriented herself by herself.
Did Muslims play a key role in recovering the spacecraft?
All that allocated money must have paid off somewhere.
I knew they shouldn’t use Windows ME.
IIRC, Kepler had a backup program that used the radiation of the Sun to determine alignment, in case the gyros weren't working. Left on her own, she resorted to this tactic. Guess it was a good plan.
Another NASA craft that has lasted well beyond it’s designed lifespan.
One item of interest on the Kepler spacecraft is a "star tracker". I don't know which kind, but I read up on what I believe are similar systems.
The star tracker I read about is evidently a self-contained system which consists of a two-inch telescope, a ccd sensor, map data of the relative positions of stars, and a computer which runs algorithms to identify which stars are presently in the field of view of the star tracker.
The field of view is about 10 degrees square, so it covers quite a bit of space (about 3% in each direction). The device communicates with the rest of the space craft using a serial interface. The spacecraft, once it knows where the spacecraft is presently pointing, can then use its thrusters to make minor adjustments in its attitude until the star tracker reports that it is looking in the preferred direction.
The spacecraft no doubt also has the data to calculate the present time and uses that to predict where the earth is for purposes of pointing its communications antenna properly to establish communications.
The spacecraft is probably equipped with algorithms to determine whether or not it is still in communication with earth and, if not, to double check its attitude and make corrections if necessary. There is probably some degree of redundancy in its capabilities, so if one attempt isn't successful at restoring communications then an alternative is tried.
If anyone reading this has more information or corrections for what I have written, I'd be glad to hear it.
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