Emergency over, Kepler gets back to discovering planets

Yesterday we reported that everyone’s favourite deep space observatory had gone into emergency mode , with its future fate unclear. The spacecraft is functional again, and has exited the emergency mode. The mission operators managed to re-orient the spacecraft with its antenna pointed towards the Earth, for communication purposes and to transmit telemetry data. The Deep Space Network ground communications returned to normal as Kepler recovered from the emergency. At the moment, Kepler is in the lowest fuel burning mode. Now the next step is to verify that the on-board systems are functional enough to return to science mode. More details of what led to the emergency and the recovery were posted on NASA’s site for the Kepler Mission. Kepler was in a fuel conserving mode called “Point Rest State”. It went into emergency mode just before a planned manoeuvre to reorient the spacecraft towards the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy for scientific measurements. An investigation is being launched to figure out what went wrong, but the priority is to return Kepler to the science operations. There are teams still monitoring the situation. Other departments in NASA sacrificed their resources, to respond to the emergency and ensure that the spacecraft was protected during the duration of the emergency. It takes 13 minutes for signals travelling at the speed of light to reach Kepler from earth, as the spacecraft is 120,000,000 kilometres away from earth.