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NASA's Kepler spacecraft is in 'emergency mode'
NASA's Kepler space telescope was supposed to be continuing its K2 extended mission to hunt down hidden exoplanets, but now scientists say the spacecraft is in trouble (again). While trying to make regularly scheduled contact on Thursday engineers found that it is operating in "emergency mode" and are focused on trying to recover it. That's a bit tricky however, since it's almost 75 million miles away from Earth, and it takes 13 minutes for signals to make a round trip.
ASTRO satellite to autonomously move objects to NextSat
Don't say we didn't warn you, as just days after ASTRO and NextSat successfully completed an autonomous fuel transfer whilst orbiting, the thoughtful duo is already looking forward to the next big challenge. As Scenario 0 operation trials continue, the ASTRO satellite will utilize its "ten-foot-long robotic arm to move objects to NextSat," the first of which will purportedly be a "spare battery transfer" that will be "snatched from ASTRO and plugged into NextSat." Reportedly, this very battery will be the focal point of a number of future handoffs, and a "secondary sensor processing computer" will eventually be offloaded to NextSat as well if the arm cooperates. Of course, these relatively minor exchanges don't mark the end of the work week for these two, as a number of future scenarios look to provide increasingly difficult challenges for "mating" the two machines. Hey, we've already got robotic rights in the works, so we're looking that way for guidance about handling these newfangled (and slightly awkward) mechanical relationships, cool? [Via Slashdot]
