One of NASA’s exoplanet hunters has gone quiet

NASA has a lot of high-tech hardware cruising around in space right now, but one of the space agency's pint-sized exoplanet hunters appears to have gone dark. In a post by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the group explains that its ASTERIA satellite has been failing to return attempts to contact it for about a month now.

ASTERIA is a tiny satellite capable of observing some very big things. The spacecraft was sent into Earth orbit in late 2017, and it spent several months studying nearby stars for changes in their brightness. These brightness dips are the telltale signs that a planet is orbiting those stars.

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One of NASA’s exoplanet hunters has gone quiet originally appeared on BGR.com on Fri, 3 Jan 2020 at 22:12:41 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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