Solar Pressure May Help Kepler Return To Planet-Hunting Duties

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Solar Pressure May Help Kepler Return To Planet-Hunting Duties

Posted by samzenpus on Monday December 2, 2013 @05:50AM from the back-to-the-search dept.

Zothecula writes "Last August, it looked as if NASA's Kepler space telescope was as good as scrap due to the failure of its attitude control system. Now the space agency proposes what it calls the K2 mission concept, which may fix the problem by using the Sun to regain attitude control and allow Kepler to resume its search for extrasolar planets."

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Attitude Control by Thanshin · 2013-12-02 05:55 · Score: 3, Informative

Attitude control
Re:Attitude Control? by gmclapp · 2013-12-02 06:08 · Score: 4, Informative

Attitude describes position in a rotational sense. TFS is correct.

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Common Sense (+1)
forget the sun by bob_super · 2013-12-02 06:09 · Score: 3, Funny

Solar pressure? The only thing that works for attitude control is peer pressure (for lack of a timeout corner in orbit).
Tell Grandpa Hubble to shame Kepler into behaving.
Light Sail by lazarus · 2013-12-02 06:12 · Score: 3

This is fascinating, but what I find even more interesting is why they couldn't use a similar technique to make the need for the attitude control wheels obsolete? It would require a spacecraft much different than Kepler, but would it not be possible to use sails to orient a similar craft no matter what area of the sky it wanted to point to?

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I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
1. Re:Light Sail by JoeMerchant · 2013-12-02 06:23 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Variability and unpredictability of the solar wind?
  It could work, but it would be like reverting from steamships to sail power, and in the billion dollar satellite business, answering the question "when will our gizmo be working?" with something like "well, between 10 and 40 days, depending on what kind of winds we get..." might not be as satisfying for the businessmen as "27 days, 13 hours and 6 minutes, +/- 30 seconds, depending on interference from the solar wind."
2. Re:Light Sail by 0123456 · 2013-12-02 06:46 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  This is fascinating, but what I find even more interesting is why they couldn't use a similar technique to make the need for the attitude control wheels obsolete?
  Wouldn't work very well near Earth, because you're in darkness much of the time and there's enough atmosphere left that drag might be larger than any force you could create from light pressure.
  But I seem to remember that Mariner Mercury used light pressure on its solar sails for attitude control when it could, to miminize fuel use by the thrusters.
3. Re:Light Sail by Deadstick · 2013-12-02 07:13 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Mod parent up. In Earth orbit, aerodynamic wind is very tiny but so is solar wind, and solar steering as a primary attitude-control system would be very complex. Acceptable as a last-ditch fallback, but you wouldn't want to base a mission on it.
4. Re:Light Sail by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-02 07:27 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Solar wind isn't what solar sails use, despite the name. A solar sail works by photon pressure, and the Sun is pretty stable when it comes to that.
5. Re:Light Sail by Herve5 · 2013-12-02 08:26 · Score: 2
  
  This works, but provides verrry small torques or forces.
  FWIW, a couple of years ago, with my (european space industry) employer and a neighbor astronomy lab we designed a device involving a large and rough telescope concentrating light on mobile smaller mirrors, so as to provide torques or even forces, but very low, to light and very slowly moving spacecrafts. We wanted to deploy a flock of these, coordinating them to form a very large, multipart space telescope. Then, well, money went on missing. This will certainly come back some day.
  Also, as mentioned around here, when in low earth orbit the multiple eclipses per day raise a situation where you lose control too often : this is really for when you're quite far from Earth.
  
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  Herve S.
just gotta say... by BenSchuarmer · 2013-12-02 06:13 · Score: 3, Funny

Don't make me get my asteroid belt!
1. Re:just gotta say... by wonkey_monkey · 2013-12-02 07:22 · Score: 3, Funny
  
  Such mercurial joviality mars this saturnine thread. Something about venereal disease...
  
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  systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
2. Re:just gotta say... by VortexCortex · 2013-12-02 12:10 · Score: 2
  
  Venereal disease? Oh good. I had feared a plutonian Uranus was the butt of the joke.
3. Re:just gotta say... by wonkey_monkey · 2013-12-02 20:10 · Score: 2
  
  Can't you be Ceres for just one minute? I think we should Nix this now before I have to come over there and Makemake you apologise.
  
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  systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Good as scrap? Hah! by Jeremy+Erwin · 2013-12-02 06:18 · Score: 2

The whole point of scrapping a ship is that the steel can be reused for other purposes. The Kepler space telescope can't be scrapped-- it's in the wrong sort of orbit to be returned to earth. From that perspective, it's actually worse than scrap.
1. Re:Good as scrap? Hah! by Deadstick · 2013-12-02 07:15 · Score: 2
  
  Indeed. "As good as scrap" could be corrected by deleting one of the S's.
Re:Attitude Control? by Anonymous Coward · 2013-12-02 07:20 · Score: 5, Funny

Oh, no, they have an attitude all right. If you point them in the wrong direction they won't even talk to you. God forbid you give one a command it doesn't like or understand; you may never hear from it again. Fussy, high-maintenance, only responding to what it wants to hear; if that's not attitude I don't know what is...