Science / NASA loses contact with satellite seeking planets outside Solar System

A NASA-operated satellite designed to hunt for distant planets may be gone for good.

According to the agency, NASA lost contact with its Arcsecond Space Telescope Enabling Research in Astrophysics (ASTERIA), a briefcase-sized spacecraft designed to study planets outside our solar system.

Communications were lost on December 5 according to NASA and the agency will continue trying to reach it until March 2020.

'The ASTERIA project achieved outstanding results during its three -month prime mission and its nearly two-year-long extended mission,' said JPL's Lorraine Fesq, current ASTERIA program manager. 

'Although we are disappointed that we lost contact with the spacecraft, we are thrilled with all that we have accomplished with this impressive CubeSat.'

The satellite, called a CubeSat, has been sending data back to NASA since 2017 and has been examining the cosmos for dips in brightness that usually correspond with nearby planets.

It completed its primary mission in early February 2018, and has carried out three mission extensions since then.  

In addition to roaming space in search of planets, it has been used as a platform to test various ways of making CubeSats more autonomous, using artificial intelligence.  

NASA says that ASTERIA paved the way for smaller and less expensive satellite missions using CubeSats and could even help supplement larger missions like NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Satellite Survey (TESS).  

TESS, dubbed NASA's 'planet hunter,' is being billed as the successor to a Kepler satellite and is equipped with four cameras that allow it to view 85 per cent of the entire sky, as it searches exoplanets orbiting stars less than 300 light-years away.

By studying objects much brighter than the Kepler targets, TESS looks to uncover new clues on the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe.

Its four wide-field cameras will view the sky in 26 segments, each of which it will observe one by one.

'The technology demonstration mission showed that many technologies necessary for studying and potentially finding exoplanets (planets orbiting stars other than our Sun) can be shrunk to fit on small satellites,' wrote NASA in a statement.