New Ways to Fly an Old Spacecraft: Enabling Further Discoveries with Kepler’s K2 Mission

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.