Nasa’s hunt of other world slows down after Kepler snag

The hunt for other worlds 'out there' has hit a speed bump with the Kepler space telescope out of action. On Tuesday, Nasa scientists found the telescope in ''safe mode'', and an investigation has now revealed that a stabilising wheel had broken, which led to the telescope switching to the, lower-power safe mode. The loss of the wheel renders the telescope unable to precisely pin-point its targets.

Kepler's chances of recovery do not seem to be encouraging, though it may be a little early to write it off.

Nasa said on its website,"The team continues to monitor the health of the spacecraft and reaction wheel friction levels during semi-weekly contacts using NASA's Deep Space Network. "

The telescope was equipped with four reaction wheels of which the first was lost in July last year. Though it can continue to function with three, the loss this takes the telescope down into the problem zone.

Launched in 2009, the mission was designed to last three-and-a-half years and till now Kepler has discovered 132 planets around other stars.

It has also identified 2,700 further candidates that are awaiting confirmation from ground-based telescopes – a task that would keep astronomers busy for years.

Kepler was designed to find another earth, or rather an earth-sized world in a habitable orbit around a Sun-like star, and though prima facie, it may have failed to do the discovery might be waiting to be made in the Kepler data that has yet to be analysed.

The space telescope took its name from the German mathematician Johannes Kepler. In the early 17th century, after decades of study, he found three mathematical laws that described the movement of planets around the Sun.

Those same laws are in use even today, and astronomers use them to calculate the movement of the planets that the Kepler space telescope identified around other stars.

Together with the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES)-European Space Agency (ESA) mission, COROT, Kepler would be remembered as the telescope that undertook the first real search for earth's twin planet.

It came as a major blow to planet-hunting scientists when NASA officials announced that a crucial wheel on the Kepler space telescope had stopped functioning and the craft had been placed in safe mode.

Even as NASA officials raised the possibility of resurrecting the telescope, scientists started mourning the potential loss of a spacecraft that they said had fundamentally altered our understanding of alien planets in the Milky Way - and earth's place in an increasingly crowded galaxy.

Project managers are considering rocking the wheel back and forth, or perhaps get the wheel that failed last year functioning again, an effort that could stretch over several months, says Kepler's deputy project manager, Charles Sobeck of the Ames Research Center. But at the same time it would also take that much time to figure out what else the telescope, which, continued to be in a fine condition, could be put to use for.