NASA Has Lost Contact With Its Tiny Planet-Hunting Satellite

For about a month , NASA has lost contact with one of its missions , get laid as ASTERIA , a satellite whose map was to come across novel planets outside the Solar System . ASTERIA is a CubeSat , a briefcase - sized space vehicle , and was deployed into Earth ’s orbit on November 20 , 2017 .

Mission manipulator have n’t had contact with the space vehicle since last December 5 and they will continue to render to reinstate communicating through March . While its operational life sentence might have hail to an end , ASTERIA delivered a Brobdingnagian amount of data point over the last two and a bit year .

" The ASTERIA project achieved outstanding results during its three - month prime mission and its most two - year - farsighted lengthened mission , " Lorraine Fesq , current ASTERIA program handler , said in astatement . " Although we are disappointed that we lose physical contact with the space vehicle , we are thrilled with all that we have accomplished with this telling CubeSat . "

ASTERIA stand for Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics . The deputation was a substantiation of construct to show that the tech demand for the discovery of exoplanets can be shrunk down to fit into small-scale satellite . The idea is that eventually , other CubeSats like ASTERIA will aid flagship major planet Orion missions such as NASA ’s incredibleTransiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey ( TESS ) , the successor of the as successful Kepler .

ASTERIA has a mixed bag of achievements under its belt .   The space vehicle was used to quiz certain autonomous capabilities of CubeSats and determine how AI can be used to run such missions . It also tookimages of Earth , a comet , and satellites in geosynchronous orbit . It even reckon at champion that might have planets but that data point is still being analyzed so we are yet to confirm any detection from this CubeSat .

ASTERIA used the theodolite method to find new planets . This approach   involves   a telescope measure the light of a sensation many times and then recording dips in its light . These dips designate that a planet might be blocking some of the starlight . To substantiate the macrocosm of a major planet several of these dips must be discover , so the telescope proceed back to the same star over and over again .