NASA's planet hunting Kepler space telescope has been shut down after the malfunction of a stabilizing (or reaction) wheel, the agency said on Wednesday.
Reuters reported that, "Launched in 2009, the Kepler space telescope revolutionized the study of so-called exoplanets, with discovery of 130 worlds orbiting distant stars and 2,700 potential planets still awaiting confirmation.
The telescope was designed to gaze at about 100,000 distant sun-like stars, searching for planets passing by, or transiting, relative to its line of sight. Detecting slight dips in the amount of light from a planet crossing the face of its parent star requires extremely precise pointing.
The telescope, the cornerstone of a $650 million mission, lost that ability on Tuesday when a second steadying spinning wheel stopped working.
The telescope needs at least three of its four wheels operating to hunt for planets. It lost use of its first wheel last year.
The telescope is orbiting about 40 million miles (64 million km) from Earth, too far for a robotic or astronaut-led repair mission, added John Grunsfeld, NASA's associate administrator for science.
"We're not ready to call the mission over, but by any measure this has been a spectacularly successful mission," Grunsfeld said.
The goal of the mission is to find Earth-sized planets located the proper distance from their parent stars so they would have the right temperatures for liquid surface water. Water is believed to be necessary for life.
Though the telescope currently isn't collecting any data, scientists have years of archived observations still to analyze.
"The mission was designed for four years. It operated four years. It gave us excellent data for four years. So I'm very delighted," said Kepler lead scientist William Borucki, with NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California."
In addition to trying to get the failed wheel working, engineers and scientists will be looking for alternative ways of operating the telescope.
These include using the two remaining wheels and the craft's boosters.
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