Kepler's Mission

The Kepler mission was brought to life, based on the basic human want to know if we really are the only form of life in the universe and if there are any other planets out there with the same conditions needed for life as on Earth. Kepler has been “specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets.”(“Mission Overview | NASA”)
Kepler is able to detect planets is by the transit method. This method has Kepler watch stars and see if there is any light coming from the star that is being blocked. If there is that light that got blocked might be from a planet, and to help determine if an object is a planet Kepler will have to watch the star for long periods of time to see if it does come back through to block light. This method however has several negatives to it. One such downfall to the transit method is that we have to be the same plane of view as the star that we are looking at, because if we aren’t then we would never see the planet blocking the light from the star. Another downfall to the transit method is that is it more favorable to bigger planets like hot Jupiters, this is because it would a lot easier to see bigger planets blocking light than …show more content…
In July of 2012, Kepler started to have problems with one of its reaction wheels, and ultimately leading to the failure of it. Reaction wheels are used “to accurately aim the telescope”. Thankfully Kepler only needs three reaction wheels for it to properly aim the telescope. Than in May of 2013, another reaction wheel failed, leading the scientists at NASA to put it into a safe mode that would allow it to keep it fuel consumption low, so that human communication to the spacecraft is still