The NASA Kepler telescope, seeking habitable planets through space, has experienced problems and is in “emergency mode” – 75 million miles (120,700,800 kilometers) from Earth, warned the US Space Agency (NASA) through a released statement.

Engineers at the space agency on Thursday put the Kepler was in emergency mode, the lowest operational level of the ship.

Setting Kepler on emergency mode will allow them to have priority access to communications that NASA sent into space. Despite these efforts, the vast distance separating the Earth ship difficult communications and makes it very slow, so that even at the speed of light a sound signal takes 13 minutes to get to the ship and back , according to NASA.

The last contact with the Kepler telescope occurred last April 4. At that time the ship was operating properly. Kepler completed its first space mission in 2012 and since then, NASA has warned about the possible existence of 5,000 planets outside the solar system.

In 2014 Kepler spacecraft began a new mission called ‘K2’ and which, in addition to searching for planets outside our solar system, the telescope’s mission was to identify young stars, supernovae and other astronomical bodies. Among the greatest achievements of the telescope include the discovery in 2015 of “cousin of the Earth”, the name by which NASA named the first planet discovered in a habitable zone in the Sun’s orbit – like star, which makes this body one of the best candidate for harboring extraterrestrial life.