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What happens when there’s an emergency on a spacecraft 75 million miles away? Operators of the Kepler deep space telescope ran into that problem recently when a scheduled check-in proved to be a bit more difficult than expected.

Kepler is searching for exoplanets outside our solar system. Orlando Sentinel’s Emilee Speck tells us how the operators acted fast to save the spacecraft and what’s ahead for Kepler.

Plus, our home turf of Orlando played host to a space engineer conference. Emilee was there and has some interesting details on the future of the Mars 2020 Rover, along with an update from Alan Stern and New Horizons.