Tag: planethunt

Following the apparent failure of reaction wheel 4, engineers were successful at transitioning the spacecraft to Point Rest State.

At our semi-weekly contact on Tuesday, May 14, 2013, we found the Kepler spacecraft once again in safe mode.

NASA will host a news teleconference at 4 p.m. EDT, today, May 15, to discuss the status of the agency’s Kepler Space Telescope.

During a scheduled contact, engineers discovered Kepler was in a self-protective mode. The spacecraft returned to science data collection on May 6.

The team recently completed a monthly science data download, marking the successful completion of Quarter 16 flight operations.

Astronomers have discovered a pair of neighboring planets with dissimilar densities orbiting very close to each other.

Since science operations began in May 2009, the Kepler team has released two catalogs of transiting planet candidates.

This artist’s concept depicts an itsy bitsy planetary system – so compact, in fact, that it’s more like Jupiter and its moons than a star and its planets. Astronomers using data from NASA’s Kepler mission and ground-based telescopes recently confirmed that the system, KOI-961, hosts the three smallest exoplanets known so far to orbit a star.

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Technicians from Ball Aerospace inspected the honeycomb structure of the Kepler Space Telescope’s primary mirror. The mirror has been 86% light-weighted; that is, it only weighs 14% of amount that a solid mirror of the same dimensions would. The mirror blank was made by Corning Glass works out of ultra-low expansion glass, or ULE.

Delta Soars

Techs Check Out Kepler

Kepler Solar Array Assembly