NASA's Kepler Spacecraft To Begin Its New K2 Mission Soon

NASA is planning to relaunch  the Kepler Space Telescope  with a tweaked steering system to withstand Sun's pressure.

In a latest announcement NASA claimed that a repurposed Kepler Space Telescope may soon start hunting the skies again. NASA plans to continue Kepler's hunt for other worlds and also offer novel opportunities to see star clusters, young stars, old stars, supernovae and active galaxies through a new mission-K2.

The mission concept of K2 has been sent to NASA headquarters and a 2014 Senior Review for a go ahead and budget proposals for the K2 mission are expected by the end of this year.

Launched in March 2009, Kepler, the space observatory's mission was to hunt for Earth like planets that are orbiting other stars. During its four-year mission it observed the brightness of more than 150,000 stars. It confirmed nearly 135 exoplanets and identified almost 3,500 candidates. The mission was expected to last until 2016, but due to the damage to the gyroscopic  reaction wheel used by the spacecraft for pointing, it was rested.

To hunt for Earth- sized exoplanets, the spacecraft needed three functioning wheels.  In May the spacecraft lost its second reaction wheel, ending the data collection for the original mission. It lost its second wheel due to the Sun. With the loss of the third wheel the spacecraft could not balance the solar pressure and it completely lost its ability to direct the spacecraft.

The engineers of the Kepler mission and Ball Aerospace came up with an innovative concept of recovering the spacecraft's ultra-precise pointing capabilities by maneuvering the spacecraft so that the solar pressure is distributed evenly across the spacecraft's surface.

They can achieve this stability by getting the orientation of the spacecraft parallel to its orbital path around the sun. In this plane the constellation of the zodiac is present.

The concept of using the sun as the 'third wheel' to manage the pointing is being tested on the spacecraft and results are drawing in. The test conducted in late October captured a full field view revealing a portion of the constellation Sagittarius.

"This 'second light' image provides a successful first step in a process that may yet result in new observations and continued discoveries from the Kepler space telescope," concludes Charlie Sobeck, Kepler deputy project manager at NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, CA.