CNES (Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales), the French space agency, officially announced the end of of the CoRoT (Convection Rotation et Transits planétaires) spacecraft’s mission, which had among its purposes the search for exoplanets. In fact, the probe stopped transmitting data after a failure in November 2012 but in the months after several attempts to restore communications were made.
The Sentinel-1A satellite was launched on April 3 2014 and is still in its testing phase. However, it’s already been used to help coordinate aid in flooded areas. One of the first images of this satellite was used at the beginning of May to create a map of the flooded area in Namibia and now new images are used to create maps of the flooded areas in the Balkans.
The ISEE-3 Reboot Project announced that the team succeeded in establishing two-way communication with the ISEE-3 (International Sun / Earth Explorer 3) space probe, also known as ICE (International Cometary Explorer). In the coming days they’ll assess the state of operation of the various systems of this probe that now is 36 years old. This is necessary to understand the best way to try to reactivate its engines and bring it to an orbit near the Earth, the same it left more than thirty years ago.
NASA has signed an agreement with an external group to allow an attempt to contact and to take control of the old ISEE-3 (International Sun/Earth Explorer 3) space probe, also known as ICE (International Cometary Explorer). It was designed to study the interactions between the Earth’s magnetic field and the solar wind along with the ISEE-1 and ISEE-2 probes but in the ’80s it was also used for the study of comets, hence the name ICE.
NASA has approved the mission K2, also called “Second Light”, for the Kepler space telescope. The funding is available for the next two years and allows to reactivate an astronomical instrument that gave tremendous success as a planet hunter but seemed lost because of a fault at its gyroscopic system that kept its pointing with extreme precision. NASA scientists devised a new way to keep Kepler pointed, albeit with certain limitations, to use it not only as a planet hunter but also for other astronomical research.
