An astronomy professor quizzed by the House Science Committee about how NASA should probe the universe for signs of life said the agency could collaborate on an international telescope to perform detailed observations of faraway, Earth-like planets discovered by the Kepler Space Telescope.
Kepler team members are drawing up new plans for the space telescope, whose original exoplanet hunt was derailed in May when the second of its four orientation-maintaining reaction wheels failed.
NASA is looking for a new mission that could keep the observatory, and the team at the Ames Research Center that operates it, busy.
The space agency issued a call for new mission proposals to help prepare for the likelihood that Kepler will never fully regain its health.
Kepler should be able to achieve its primary goal regardless of whether or not it can bounce back from a recent malfunction.
NASA engineers are preparing a plan to return the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope to service following a reaction wheel failure that shut down the four-year-old observatory in May.
Kepler has spotted more than 2,700 potential exoplanets to date, with many more waiting to be plucked from the mission’s huge data set.
The planet-hunting days of NASA's prolific Kepler space telescope, which has discovered more than 2,700 potential alien worlds to date, may be over.
One of the planet-hunting Kepler space telescope’s reaction wheels — devices that maintain the observatory’s position in space — remains balky despite mitigation attempts.
David McGlade said he is “extremely pleased” with the company’s initial stock offering given the markets’ recent volatility, saying Intelsat succeeded in placing about 25 percent of the company’s equity value, which is about average for recent stock-market introductions.
The problem does not necessarily mean an imminent mission failure, project officials say.
Science operations for Kepler were suspended to evaluate a balky reaction wheel.
NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has begun its extended mission, which should keep the prolific instrument searching for alien worlds for another four years, agency officials announced Nov. 14.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star’s habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new exoplanet candidates, researchers here announced Dec. 5.
NASA’s prolific Kepler Space Telescope may get to extend its search for exoplanets by a few years.
NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting space telescope resumed science operations March 20 after spending six days stuck in a protective safe mode while engineers studied the computer glitch.
The Milky Way galaxy could be home to 50 billion planets, according to scientists working on NASA’s Kepler planet-hunting space telescope.
A new instrument being built by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for use in the Canary Islands will help NASA’s planet-scouting Kepler spacecraft confirm and characterize potential alien planets.
NASA’s Kepler mission already has found more than 1,200 potential alien planets, but it will likely be a few years before it hauls in the exoplanet “holy grail” — an alien Earth.