NASA Just Recovered Its Drifting Kepler Spacecraft

After an inexplicable shift into Emergency Mode, NASA managed to partially recover its planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft. But we still don’t know what caused it to wig out in the first place. It’s been a tense few days for the Kepler team since a regularly scheduled interchange with the spacecraft on Thursday, April 8th revealed that it had switched over to Emergency Mode. Today, NASA announced that it has recovered the spacecraft, and that it’s on its way back to normal operations. What caused the Emergency Mode shift still isn’t known, though NASA steered blame away from the reaction wheels, whose failure a few years back left the spacecraft spinning (temporarily) out of control. More

(Source: Gizmodo - Apr 11)