The Kepler spacecraft was in trouble and NASA still has concerns. During a routine contact with the unmanned spacecraft last week NASA was surprised to find Kepler in fuel-burning Emergency Mode. To make matters worse, the agency can’t just hop on a shuttle to fix whatever’s wrong — Kepler is almost 75 million miles away. A later update indicates the worst may be over, but NASA won’t know for sure till the end of the week when all the data from the spacecraft has arrived and been analyzed.
After completing its initial mission in 2014 detecting exoplanets (planets that orbit stars other than our sun), Kepler was given an additional task known as K2. K2 involves researching other astronomical objects including young stars, supernovae, and pretty much anything else Kepler can detect in outer space, while at the same time looking for more exoplanets. All bets are off now, when a spacecraft emergency was declared, providing highest level access to NASA’s communications systems. That status has now cleared, but there are many unanswered questions.
See also: NASA delays InSight mission, says we won’t be going to Mars again until at least 2018
NASA was about to re-orient Kepler to point toward the middle of the Milky Way for a microlensing experiment. Microlensing is a method of detecting the existence of planets based on bending of light due to the force of gravity. When a planet orbits in front of its star, its gravity force causes a brief brightening of the star’s light. This brightening is measurable and proves the existence of an exoplanet even when the planet itself cannot be seen.
When NASA checked in with the spacecraft on April 7th, however, that’s when it discovered Kepler in Emergency Mode (EM). On April 4th all systems were fine, but on a Thursday check-in the spacecraft had apparently been in EM for 36 hours. Because of the craft’s distance from Earth, communications signals sent to Kepler take roughly 13 minutes to make the round trip.
Now that NASA has re-established communications with Kepler and can hopefully figure out if anything needs fixing, K2 is up in the air. If the spacecraft burns through its fuel stores, that effectively ends the Kepler research mission, but that has likely been averted. We hope.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.