NASA 2020 started with very bad news that saddened a lot of people, but unfortunately it seems that nothing could be done to avoid this situation, which is a problem for the agency. Specifically, those from NASA announced that one of the satellites with a telescope that was meant to discover exoplanets, stopped communicating with its instruments on Earth, and it seems that there is no longer any way to retrieve data from her now
NASA launched ASTERIA on November 20, 2017 for a mission that was initially thought to last 6 months, but which was extended for 2 years, and on December 5 the satellite stopped communicating with the agency's engineers. Although from December 5 and until the beginning of 2020, the people from NASA tried to communicate with this satellite, they did not manage to get in touch with it, but they will continue the process until March in the hope that something will change.
NASA: The BAD news that SAD the whole world in 2020
NASA claims that ASTERIA is a type of satellite that is part of the CubeSeats category, meaning it has very small dimensions, and its engineers were surprised that it worked for so long before it stopped communicating with the Earth. ASTERIA was created by NASA to demonstrate that the technologies needed to discover distant planets can be included in small satellites, with the role of assisting the TESS telescope in the discovery of exoplanets.
"Mission operators at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have lost contact with the ASTERIA satellite, a briefcase-sized spacecraft designed to study planets outside our solar system. The last successful communication with ASTERIA, short for the Arcsecond Space Telescope that enables research in astrophysics, was on December 5; Contact attempts are expected to continue in March 2020.”
NASA has had impressive results thanks to the data it was able to collect from ASTERIA, and claims that this mission will be the basis of big changes for the way we analyze the entire universe. Of course, NASA still hopes to be able to communicate with this very important satellite in 2020, but since he refused to respond to commands for a month, it is unlikely that any changes will occur in the coming months.
NASA will also launch other similar satellites into Earth's orbit to analyze the vast universe and discover new planets, or even stars, and ASTERIA will help it reduce the size of the ships and satellites it creates.
