NASA Attempts to Resurrect Planet-Hunting Probe, Kepler

NASA's Kepler space telescope has been hunting planets for years. Yet it abruptly stopped its search two months ago after a positioning system failure. Now, the space agency is attempting to get the telescope back on track, so that it hopefully can continue to search for alien planets.

Unfortunately, the prognosis doesn't look good. The $550 million telescope will have to get its reaction wheels spinning again, which are part of a system needed to keep the observatory focused on its targets. Without them, Kepler's planet-hunting days are over.

"I think the general feeling is that the odds are not good," said Charlie Sobeck, deputy project manager at NASA's Ames Research Center, in an interview with Discovery News. "We might see a wheel spin, but I suspect that it will not spin freely, that there will be vibrations, which would not make the science happy."

Although Kepler stopped functioning in mid-May, controllers have remained in communication with the craft. Currently, the telescope is about 45 million miles from Earth, which means that it takes about four minutes for a radio signal to traverse the space between, according to CNN.com.

Currently, NASA is planning on conducting a week-long series of tests. In the first round of these tests, telemetry from the spacecraft indicated that the wheel that shut down in May spun counterclockwise, but didn't respond to commands to turn clockwise. While they study the results of these tests, they'll go ahead and test the other wheel, according to CNN.com.

"We really want Kepler to be able to return to be able to operate in the same way that it was before the wheel failed," said Sara Seager, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an interview with CNN.com. "That's the ultimate hope."

Even if NASA can't get Kepler working again, though, the space agency will continue to use the craft for other missions--albeit less important ones, according to FCW.com. Yet that doesn't mean it's a total loss; Kepler has already gathered a massive amount of information for scientists. Launched in 2009, the data that it's collected will keep scientists busy for at least another two years.