Science AMA Series: We're the engineers who saved NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, twice! AMA!

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Hi reddit!

Engineers, and their scientist colleagues, who saved NASA’s Kepler spacecraft – twice – will answer questions about what it took to recover Kepler and get it back on the job of searching for exoplanets and a menagerie of astrophysical phenomenon on Reddit.com on Wednesday, May 4 at 11 a.m. PDT.

The engineers and scientists at NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley, Ball Aerospace and the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, both located in Boulder, had saved Kepler once before in 2013, using the subtle pressure from our sun as balance after wheels keeping the spacecraft steady failed soon after it completed an additional year in an extended mission. This save gave the spacecraft a new job called the K2 mission. K2 continues the legacy of planet hunting but has presented new opportunities to study supernovae, star clusters and galaxies far, far away. On April 8, right before it was slated to embark on K2's Campaign 9, a monumental scientific expedition to search for far out worlds, engineers found the spacecraft in a fuel-intensive “coma”. On April 22, the spacecraft was recovered to science mode and began making observations for the K2 mission once again.

We’ll be back at 2 pm EST (11 am PST, 7 pm UTC) to answer your questions, ask us anything!

">Science AMA Series: We're the engineers who saved NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft, twice! AMA!