For this, Kepler was put into a so-called "earth-traling orbit," engineered according to specifications determined by calculus-based tools.
2011 Russian Phobos-Grunt probe gets stuck in Earth's orbit, leaving engineers three days to rescue the mission.
A rocket's failure early this morning to carry the Earth-observing satellite Glory into orbit shocked engineers, who saw the same sort of disaster doom another climate satellite in 2009.
With confirmation of the orbit, happy scientists and engineers gave thumbs-up signs and slapped hands to celebrate their space first.
The craft, the Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer, or Ladee, is in orbit around Earth as engineers check that everything is working; it heads for the Moon in about a month.
Communications had been scheduled to end today, exactly one year after the craft went into orbit around Eros. Engineers signaled NEAR, for Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, to turn on its gamma ray spectrometer, an instrument intended to determine the composition of material on the surface of the asteroid and a few inches below.
"We kind of knew going in that we wouldn't be burning discs with our games and giving them to friends," says Scott Cartier, creator of the Net Yaroze game Decaying Orbit and now game engineer at Playfirst, "but it was still a bummer that the only people who could really try our games were other Yaroze members.
The satellite then typically has a lifetime of between five and seven years, after which it runs out of fuel and must be decommissioned and placed in a junk orbit, says James Northam, a senior engineer at Surrey Satellite Technology, a British satellite firm.
Then a 26-minute firing on Wednesday night lowered the orbit to 155 miles and let engineers fine-tune their projections for the spacecraft's terminal dive into the atmosphere.
