NASA has decided to stop trying to fix its Kepler telescope as its broken positioning system "cannot be fixed" according to NASA officials.
The observatory was launched in 2009 to look for Earth-sized worlds located around their parent stars for water.
The telescope hasn't been used since May however as it lost use of equipment needed to keep it steady on approximately 100,000 target stars according to Reuters.
Before the technical issues, Kepler worked by finding "slight dips" in the amount of light coming from a specific star, a clear sign that a planet was passing nearby.
The technique requires three spinning wheels to control the telescopes controls, and without it scientists can't move it to the left, right, up, or down. Kepler's spare wheel was put into service last July after a wheel failure according to NASA.
NASA engineers started tests in July to see if either jammed wheel could be saved, but they were not successful according to Reuters.
"The wheels are sufficiently damaged that they cannot sustain spacecraft pointing control for any extended period of time," Charles Sobeck, Kepler deputy project manager at NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, said according to Reuters.
The telescope may be able to be used for projects that don't require "precise positioning" like finding comets and asteroids, for example.
The budget for the Kepler project is currently at $18 million a year according to Reuters. The telescope has found 135 different planets beyond our solar system and 3,500 potential plants according to NASA.
Approximately two years of data has yet to be analyzed.
"I'm confident that we are going to find what we expected, but we're going to have to work hard for the next couple of years," said Kepler lead scientist William Borucki, according to Reuters.
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