For the second time now, NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler telescope is in emergency mode, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said in a statement. As reports, the spacecraft was fully operational and in good condition last April 4, but Charlie Sobeck, Kepler and K2 mission manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center, announced how it had been discovered last April 7 that the Kepler is presently in its lowest operational mode.
The telescope is consuming a significant amount of fuel as scientists are working to find creative fixes. No one knows what exactly the problem is, and efforts are especially difficult because the spacecraft is 75 million miles away. It takes 13 minutes to register a command and receive a response on Earth. As a result, the telescope now has priority access to ground-based communication on NASA’s Deep Space Network. Emergency mode will force Kepler to continue to burn quickly through its power supply, so there’s a great deal of urgency to save the $600 million spacecraft.
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