Giving instructions to the Kepler exoplanet hunter at LASP mission control

One response to “Giving instructions to the Kepler exoplanet hunter at LASP mission control”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Mar 12, 2015 at 3:39 am

   The "Go" command now takes 11 minutes to round trip to the Kepler spacecraft in an Earth-trailing orbit. With my buddy Erik Erik at mission control: Alan Eustace (Google exec and record holder for the highest free fall) inspects the Kepler console:Earlier that day, we visited Ball Aerospace, who developed the sensor array for the Kepler exo-planet hunter: Each HgCdTe sensor operates as a module. So far, two of the 21 sensors on Kepler have failed, but they can route around that when picking patches of deep space to observe in phase two of the mission (where use the spacecraft as a sailing ship in the solar wind to overcome the loss of one axis of positioning from the failed momentum wheel gyros).

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