FA grad honored by NASA

Kipp Larson, son of Gary and Elaine Larson of Dover-Foxcroft and a 1989 graduate of Foxcroft Academy, recently accepted an award on behalf of his team from the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

The NASA Ames Honor Award was given for repairing NASA’s Kepler spacecraft and subsequently creating the K2 mission.

The Kepler spacecraft was launched in 2009 to search for Earth-like planets around other stars. It observes thousands of stars at one time and looks for the slight dimming of starlight that occurs when a planet passes in front of the star.

Contributed photo It’s an honor — Kipp Larson, left, accepts the NASA Ames Honor Award on behalf of his team for repairing the Kepler spacecraft. Presenting the award is Dr. Thomas A. Edwards, deputy director for the NASA Ames Research Center.

To date, the Kepler mission has discovered nearly 5,700 exoplanet candidates and 12 confirmed Earth-sized planets in the habitable zone of their stars. The habitable zone is a range of distances from the star which allows the planet temperature to be suitable for liquid water to exist, a condition seen as most likely to promote the development of life.

Larson is the mission operations manager for the Kepler mission. In that capacity, he leads the team of engineers responsible for controlling the spacecraft. In order to find planets, the spacecraft must be pointed extremely accurately while it observes stars for long periods of time.

In 2014, the second of four reaction wheels, the devices that control the pointing of the spacecraft, failed suddenly. This led most people to believe that the mission was over. Larson’s team was able to develop a completely new way to point the spacecraft with the two remaining reaction wheels and create a brand-new mission in just a matter of months.

The new mission, named K2, should allow the spacecraft to operate for three years longer than it otherwise would have, and at less than 1 percent of what a replacement mission would have cost.

According to Larson, “After the spacecraft was crippled, we would have been thrilled to come back and find even one planet. In the first year alone, we’ve discovered over 200.”

Larson works for Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp in Boulder, Colo.