Abstract
The Kepler spacecraft revolutionized the field of exoplanet discovery during its prime mission and expanded upon that with its K2 extended mission following the failure of a second reaction wheel. While the K2 mission demonstrated that the Kepler spacecraft was still able to perform high-resolution photometry and find exoplanets, there were still many challenges to be faced from aging hardware, the increasing distance from the Earth and the desire to make the mission last as long as possible. This paper, which derives material from a paper the authors delivered at the SpaceOps 2018 conference [1], will review several examples of these challenges, the solutions that were devised and their outcomes with regard to improving performance, extending the mission lifetime, and demonstrating the cost-effectiveness of a small mission operations team.
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References
Larson, K., McCalmont-Everton, K., Peterson, C., Ross, S., Troeltzsch, J., & Wiemer, D. (2018, May). New ways to fly an old spacecraft: Enabling further discoveries with Kepler’s K2 mission. In AIAA SpaceOps 2018, Marseille, France. AIAA 2018-2697.
https://www.nasa.gov/kepler/discoveries. Retrieved April 4, 2018.
Larson, K. A., McCalmont, K. M., Peterson, C. A., & Ross, S. E. (2014). Kepler mission operations response to wheel anomalies. In 2014 AIAA SpaceOps Conference, Pasadena, CA, May 5–9 2014. Paper AIAA 2014-1882.
Howell, S. B., et al. (2014). The K2 mission: Characterization and early results. Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 126(938).
McCalmont-Everton, K., Putnam, D., Wiemer, D., Larson, K., Peterson, C., & Ross, S. (2018). Novel spacecraft recovery, guidance and control to enable Kepler science mission continuation. In AAS Guidance and Control Conference, Breckenridge, CO, February 2–7, 2018. Paper AAS 18-117.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to express their appreciation to Lee Reedy and the professionals and students at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado, Boulder for operating the spacecraft, to Dr. Ray Littlejohn of the University of Colorado, Boulder for his advice on statistical data analysis and to Tina Kelly of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center for going above and beyond in acquiring DSN contact time to enable both anomaly recovery and nominal operations.
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Larson, K.A., McCalmont-Everton, K.M., Peterson, C.A., Ross, S.E., Troeltzsch, J., Wiemer, D. (2019). New Ways to Fly an Old Spacecraft: Enabling Further Discoveries with Kepler’s K2 Mission. In: Pasquier, H., Cruzen, C., Schmidhuber, M., Lee, Y. (eds) Space Operations: Inspiring Humankind's Future. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11536-4_24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11536-4_24
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