• Kepler telescope dead after finding thousands of worlds
    16 replies, posted
https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/nasa-declares-elite-planet-hunting-spacecraft-dead-58857273
goodnight (metaphorically since its never night 90 million miles away) sweat prince.
Good work, little space scope. You can rest now. Kepler's original mission was considered complete in 2012. Everything since then was just "it hasn't completely stopped working yet, let's keep using it". And the replacement, TESS, is starting to send back results - and it's searching the whole sky, not the small sectors Kepler could search. It's kind of sad that it's getting shut down entirely instead of just left running, but it makes sense. There's nothing left that it can do, and even a small risk that it could one day bug out and start screaming on DSN frequencies, blocking communications with other probes, is not worth the sentimentality.
Kept doing it's job until not a drop of fuel was left, amazing credit to those who designed, built and operated Kepler. When it began to fail they used the solar wind to stabilise the mission and continue finding new worlds. 2681 confirmed planets around other stars, and only looking at tiny portions of the sky. TESS is going to find many many more candidates for planets and when James Webb Space Telescope goes up we'll be able to know more about these exo-planets than ever before. Kepler peeled back the veil of our galaxy and showed that not only is our solar system not particularly unique, but also that the number of planets out there is quite simply beyond description. This mission has thoroughly changed how we view the universe. RIP Little Telescope.
It was truly saddening to hear the news that he had perspired.
The solution to the Fermi paradox right there folks. Or as Douglas Adams put it Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space. Consider what this one telescope that went above and beyond its expected limitations showed us. And that's NOTHING Goodness knows what our bigger, meaner and uglier telescopes will find, if THAT'S what we built then god only knows what we'll find next.
I hope once we achieve reasonable space flight we go around space and get all the satellites, telescopes, and rovers back. Must be lonely out there
see you space cowboy
Your time is now, buddy. You had shown us the world, now we'll show you our gratitude.
Thats so sad, Alexa play despacito.
There's a whole bunch, unfortunately most of them are selfies.
Well, here's hoping we make a new kick-ass telescope with modern technology and fire it into orbit.
they already did https://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/ https://tess.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/nasa-exoplanet-missions.png James Webb is next, and that's when things really get cool.
Can you slap the cuffs on time and space?
The scope peered too much into infinity and lost it's little circuit mind. Poor scope.
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