During a scheduled contact on Thursday, April 7, mission operations engineers discovered that the Kepler spacecraft was in Emergency Mode.
Tag: NASA
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Busy Traffic at the International Space Station
Expedition 47 Flight Engineer Tim Peake of ESA took this photograph on April 6, 2016, as the International Space Station flew over Madagascar, showing three of the five spacecraft docked to the station. The station crew awaits the scheduled launch today, April 8, of the third resupply vehicle in three weeks: a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft.
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Searching for Far Out and Wandering Worlds
Teaming up on a global experiment in exoplanet observation, NASA’s K2 mission and Earth-based observatories on six continents will use gravitational microlensing to search for exoplanets that are too distant and dark to detect any other way.
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April 7, 1991, Deployment of Breakthrough Gamma-ray Observatory
Twenty-five years ago, NASA launched the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, an astronomical satellite that transformed our knowledge of the high-energy sky. In this view, taken on April 7, 1991, from the aft flight deck window of space shuttle Atlantis, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory is released by the shuttle’s remote manipulator system.
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Computer-Simulated Image of a Supermassive Black Hole
Astronomers have uncovered a near-record breaking supermassive black hole in an unlikely place: in the center of a galaxy in a sparsely populated area of the universe. The observations, made by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the Gemini Telescope in Hawaii, may indicate that these monster objects may be more common than once thought.
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The Turbulent North Atlantic
The Gulf Stream waters flow in somewhat parallel layers, slicing across what is otherwise a fairly turbulent western North Atlantic Ocean in this March 9, 2016 image collected by the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on NASA-NOAA’s Suomi NPP satellite. The turbulence is made visible by the pigmented phytoplankton it entrains.
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Moonset Viewed From the International Space Station
Expedition 47 Flight Engineer Tim Peake of ESA took this striking photograph of the moon from his vantage point aboard the International Space Station on March 28, 2016. Peake shared the image on March 30 and wrote to his social media followers, “I was looking for #Antarctica – hard to spot from our orbit. Settled for a moonset instead.”
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Orion Spacecraft Suited Crew Testing
Engineers at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston are evaluating how crews inside a mockup of the Orion spacecraft interact with the rotational hand controller and cursor control device while inside their Modified Advanced Crew Escape spacesuits.
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Hubble Peers Into the Heart of the Milky Way Galaxy
Peering deep into the dusty heart of our Milky Way galaxy using infrared vision, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reveals a rich tapestry of more than half a million stars. Except for a few blue foreground stars, the stars are part of the Milky Way’s nuclear star cluster, the most massive and densest star cluster in our galaxy.
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NASA’s Spitzer Maps Climate Patterns on a Super-Earth
Observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have led to the first temperature map of a super-Earth planet — a rocky planet nearly two times as big as ours. The map reveals extreme temperature swings from one side of the planet to the other, and hints that a possible reason for this is the presence of lava flows.
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Earth Art in Northwestern Australia
During an International Space Station flyover of Australia, NASA astronaut Jeff Williams captured a colorful image of the coast and shared it with his social media followers on March 29, 2016, writing, “The unique terrain of the northwestern Australian coast.”
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NASA Selects Instrument Team to Build Next-Gen Planet Hunter
NASA has selected a team to build a new, cutting-edge instrument that will detect planets outside our solar system by measuring the miniscule “wobbling” of stars. The instrument will be the centerpiece of a new partnership with the National Science Foundation called the NASA-NSF Exoplanet Observational Research program.
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Greenland's Ice Sheet From 40,000 Feet
The Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) field campaign team is flying NASA’s G-III aircraft at about 40,000 feet. On a clear day, this altitude also provides a stunning perspective of one of the world’s two great ice sheets (the other is Antarctica). The flight Saturday, March 26, over the northeast coastline was one of those clear days.