As you may remember there has recently been indications of problems with the reaction wheel #4 on the Kepler spacecraft. On 14 May 2013, the Kepler spacecraft was placed in thruster-controlled safe mode when it appeared reaction wheel 4's spin rate dropped to zero. A present the plan for Kepler is to enter Point Rest State – a loosely controlled point-state of the spacecraft, using thrusters, which minimizes fuel usage and provides a continuous communication link.
According to NASA the spacecraft is currently stable and safe. Work is underway to fully evaluate the spacecraft's current status and determine what, if any, recovery operations are available. It will take weeks to fully evaluate the present situation in detail before making final decisions.
No decision has yet been made to end the Kepler Spacecraft's data collection mission.
More details will follow. Check e.g. the Kepler webpage: http://kepler.nasa.gov/
The new Q14 data is now available in the database. Please have a look at the data release notes, which can be found under "Information".
We also announce some new types of corrected data in the KASOC database: The Pixel corrected Red Giant data. These constitutes data on many of the Red Giants where new pixel-masks was created and new light curves was subsequently extracted using the new masks, concatenated over all available quarters, corrected for instrumental effects and filtered for long term trends.
We provide five (5) different data products, including both light curves and power density spectra. For more information, please have a look at the data release notes which can be found at "Information -> Red Giant data".
The data is available both through the data search interface and as bundles. Enjoy!
You now have the possibility to download your data as WGET scripts from the Data Search interface.
The new option will create a bash-shell script (works on Linux, Mac OSX and possible Windows with eg. Cygwin). When the script in run on your workstation, it will ask for your login to the KASOC website, and then start downloading your selected files one at a time.
This can be very useful if you need to download many files at a time, because the KASOC servers doesn't have to package your files in a zip-archive before sending the data to your machine. This can in case of large downloads be extremely time-consuming and may slow down the website.
So if you need to download large amounts of data try out the new WGET script download options!
Please contact us if you experience any problems with the new system.