NASA – The Orbital

After 9 years in operation, the Kepler space satellite has finally run out of the hydrazine fuel used to control its orientation. NASA has decided to retire the satellite while it is still in a safe orbit far from Earth. Launched in March 2009, Kepler was originally intended to look at one patch of the sky and detect planets orbiting around distant stars. This patch in the constellation of Cygnus contained 150,000 stars. Four years in, a fix for a mechanical issue led to the development of the K2 mission where the satellite had to be periodically reoriented, expanding its field of view to a further 500,000 stars. How to Find a Planet The satellite’s only scientific instrument was a photometer designed to detect drops in brightness that occur when a planet passes in front of a star, ...

If you’re asked the question “What is orbiting the Earth?”, the first answer to come to your mind might be “The Moon”. Another answer could be “The International Space Station” or a number of other television or GPS satellites. If you stop for a moment and think about it, you will realise that for people to be able to have global network coverage, there must be a very large number of satellites surrounding the Earth, careful moving around each other. But these aren’t the only things bouncing around in our exosphere. The current count of trackable “space junk”, the term for assorted space debris, is over 500,000, and this is creating a massive negative impact on the future of space travel. Space junk is mainly artificial, caused by leftover bits of rockets and space stations that have f...

Tag: NASA

The Death of the Kepler Satellite

What’s Up in Space?