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Exploration

Some Hope for Kepler

By Marc Boucher
NASA Watch
July 5, 2013
Filed under ,

Kepler Mission Manager Update: Preparing for Recovery, NASA
The engineering team has devised initial tests for the recovery attempt and is checking them on the spacecraft test bed at the Ball Aerospace facility in Boulder, Colo. The team anticipates that exploratory commanding of Kepler’s reaction wheels will commence mid-to-late July. The Kepler spacecraft will remain in PRS until and during the tests.
Later this month, an update to the data processing pipeline software will be deployed. Called SOC 9.1, this enhancement has been underway for several months and is in the final stages of verification and validation. This software release provides additional refinements to better tease out small planet signatures from the four years of Kepler data. It will also decrease the frequency of false positives.

Related: NASA To Attempt To Revive Stricken Kepler Telescope in July, Space News
I think the general feeling is that the odds are not good. We might see a wheel spin, but I suspect that it will not spin freely, that there will be noise on it — vibrations — which would not make the science happy,” Charlie Sobeck, deputy project manager at NASA’s Ames Research Center, told SpaceNews.
Marc’s note: According to the Space News article they will work on wheel 4 first and then 2. Let’s hope they beat the odds and some remote engineering does the trick.

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