NASA Gives Up on Resurrecting Kepler Telescope

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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It looks like the excellent mission of the Kepler telescope will be coming to a close. After hardware failure and attempts to restart, NASA has officially called the mission at an end.

The telescope and imaging equipment on Kepler are still functioning well, so NASA is now inviting researchers to submit proposals to use them for additional science missions that can work even with the telescope's limited pointing capabilities.
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Sucks because the Kepler just opened up another window into how crowded the Universe is. Extrapolating from data something like 1.6 planets per star in the galaxy on average, PER STAR.

Oh well that's what you get when you plant a telescope a million miles away from Earth.
Either way I'm sure there is a mountain of data that hasn't even been looked at yet.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Sucks because the Kepler just opened up another window into how crowded the Universe is. Extrapolating from data something like 1.6 planets per star in the galaxy on average, PER STAR.

Oh well that's what you get when you plant a telescope a million miles away from Earth.
Either way I'm sure there is a mountain of data that hasn't even been looked at yet.
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If I recall, Kepler found around 3500-plus candidates and only around 160 to 170 have been confirmed or analyzed.

So, yeah, scientists are going to be busy poring through all that data that Kepler has gathered.

It's unfortunate we do not have the means anymore to go there and repair it. We're going to have similar problems when the James-Webb Space Telescope is launched in a few more years.
 
I'm amazed NASA can keep stuff running in space for years and years with very few malfunctions/failures.
And the goberment wants to cut NASA funding. Maybe NASA should be making cars. :D
 
octoberasian said:
It's unfortunate we do not have the means anymore to go there and repair it. We're going to have similar problems when the James-Webb Space Telescope is launched in a few more years.
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We never had the means to repair it, it was just too far away, sames with the James Webb it's going to be way too far away to repair even if we did still have the space shuttle going.
 
I realize they are entirely different pieces of equipment, with completely different levels of sophistication, but isn't there a Voyager probe still wandering around out there 30+ years later? Or the Opportunity rover on Mars that has exceeded its mission timetable by a number of years?

With the engineering minds and technology we have available, not to mention the money spent on these pieces of equipment, can't we build something to last longer than 3 - 4 years? Analyze what went wrong, like we have done with previous equipment in space, and build the next one to last.

This event will likely be used to call for further decreases in the NASA budget, instead of the other way around. If we want people to take S.T.E.M. seriously enough in this country that we do not need to keep importing scientists and engineers from other countries, we should have some monumental scientific organizations like NASA receiving better funding. And yes, I know that there is significant evidence that the "tech" shortage is being overblown...
 
sfsuphysics said:
We never had the means to repair it, it was just too far away, sames with the James Webb it's going to be way too far away to repair even if we did still have the space shuttle going.
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Yup, too damn far to do anything bout it, unfortunately. Looks like Kepler is about 40 million miles from earth (64 million km) and James Webb will be at the L2 point...0.93 million miles (1.5 milllion km) away.
 
benzino_86 said:
I'm amazed NASA can keep stuff running in space for years and years with very few malfunctions/failures.
And the goberment wants to cut NASA funding. Maybe NASA should be making cars. :D
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IF the car makers wanted to make a care that never or very rarely broke down they could, but why would they? They can get you on parts, on labor on warranty... That is money.

So they aren't going to want to move away from the current model.
 
That sucks. I have loved following NASA articles about new discoveries. Guess maybe they should look forward to getting Fermi up in orbit.
 
Technology is far more sophisticated than it was in the 70's, probably why things break down easier in the environment of space. Kepler was a huge success. We should be grateful for that. People are finally understanding just how big the universe is and that the possiblity of life out there is statistically guaranteed. The cancellation of SIM Lite is a damn shame. This country needs to get its act together.
 
MrCaffeineX said:
I realize they are entirely different pieces of equipment, with completely different levels of sophistication, but isn't there a Voyager probe still wandering around out there 30+ years later? Or the Opportunity rover on Mars that has exceeded its mission timetable by a number of years?
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Voyager yup, it's your basic satellite type of probe with a hunk of plutonium that fuels it. On Mars we have a few dead rovers, and yes the one with a broken wheel dragging itself along. They outlived their mission time.

With the engineering minds and technology we have available, not to mention the money spent on these pieces of equipment, can't we build something to last longer than 3 - 4 years? Analyze what went wrong, like we have done with previous equipment in space, and build the next one to last.
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The mission was planned to last 3.5 years, they got pretty damn close to that goal, unfortunately the gyroscopes that give it proper orientation failed, and yes they had a back up, they needed 3, they went with 4, they only have 2. It happens
 
sfsuphysics said:
Sucks because the Kepler just opened up another window into how crowded the Universe is. Extrapolating from data something like 1.6 planets per star in the galaxy on average, PER STAR.
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Yeah, that's the biggest no-no when it comes to statistics/graphs. Never extrapolate!
 
Exavior said:
IF the car makers wanted to make a care that never or very rarely broke down they could, but why would they? They can get you on parts, on labor on warranty... That is money.

So they aren't going to want to move away from the current model.
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The best we should do is nationalize the car companies. We see what they do in the hands of creedy corporations.
 
I just cant believe that the best aiming mechanism they had was spinning tires.
 
MrCaffeineX said:
I realize they are entirely different pieces of equipment, with completely different levels of sophistication, but isn't there a Voyager probe still wandering around out there 30+ years later? Or the Opportunity rover on Mars that has exceeded its mission timetable by a number of years?

With the engineering minds and technology we have available, not to mention the money spent on these pieces of equipment, can't we build something to last longer than 3 - 4 years? Analyze what went wrong, like we have done with previous equipment in space, and build the next one to last.

This event will likely be used to call for further decreases in the NASA budget, instead of the other way around. If we want people to take S.T.E.M. seriously enough in this country that we do not need to keep importing scientists and engineers from other countries, we should have some monumental scientific organizations like NASA receiving better funding. And yes, I know that there is significant evidence that the "tech" shortage is being overblown...
Click to expand...

Yes voyager is actually at the "edge" of the solar system and they are waiting for it to exit monitoring it every day.
 
rudy said:
Yes voyager is actually at the "edge" of the solar system and they are waiting for it to exit monitoring it every day.
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They will never agree that is has exited, they will just make up some other layer.
 
sfsuphysics said:
Explain.
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You have certain data correct? Now you make a line based on that data's graph, the further you go past your last data point, the less accurate the slope of that line will be. I remember reading something about Manchester United fans, they interviewed maybe 40,000 people and from that concluded that almost 900 million people were fans of Manchester United. That's obviously pretty far from the actual number. Basically, the further you move from your last data point the less accurate your results become. It's one of the first things you learn in statistics(I hate that subject, but that's something I got from it :p)
 
MrCaffeineX said:
I realize they are entirely different pieces of equipment, with completely different levels of sophistication, but isn't there a Voyager probe still wandering around out there 30+ years later? Or the Opportunity rover on Mars that has exceeded its mission timetable by a number of years?

With the engineering minds and technology we have available, not to mention the money spent on these pieces of equipment, can't we build something to last longer than 3 - 4 years? Analyze what went wrong, like we have done with previous equipment in space, and build the next one to last.
Click to expand...

Its simple physics. The spacecraft uses reaction wheels (flywheels) to aim the telescope at targets with the necessary precision. Lubricants to not like to stay on moving objects in a zero-g environment, meaning that flywheels are bound to fail eventually.

You can also use small chemical thrusters like they did on Voyager, but that adds fuel weight and costs more. Kepler was supposed to be a cheap proof-of-concept mission.
 
I wish we as a society were more ambitious about space.
 
xIronCrossx said:
You have certain data correct? Now you make a line based on that data's graph, the further you go past your last data point, the less accurate the slope of that line will be. I remember reading something about Manchester United fans, they interviewed maybe 40,000 people and from that concluded that almost 900 million people were fans of Manchester United. That's obviously pretty far from the actual number. Basically, the further you move from your last data point the less accurate your results become. It's one of the first things you learn in statistics(I hate that subject, but that's something I got from it :p)
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Ok I understand that, however going with your Man. U example it all depends upon the sampling criterion to how skewed it happens to be, and when you put in the human element you can get some pretty wacked out values.

The extrapolation in this sense was that Kepler looked at a particular part of the sky and only that part, no bias was given towards why that particular part, it just was a piece of the sky.

Now granted there are potential errors with their extrapolation like perhaps that part of the sky did happen to have an abundance of planets by random chance, and there could be less planets (they have a fairly large range actually) but there could be more planets. Overall though I think because of the sheer number of stars involved, all the little minus values do tend to get cancelled out with positive values and as we continue on with our exploring and notice these same ratios with other random parts of the sky we look at our extrapolation starts to make sense.

Either way I think it's hard to argue that there are WAY more than 8 planets in the galaxy now :)
 
benzino_86 said:
I'm amazed NASA can keep stuff running in space for years and years with very few malfunctions/failures.
And the goberment wants to cut NASA funding. Maybe NASA should be making cars. :D
Click to expand...

It really is not that surprising that stuff can last really long out in space.

The temperature is not going to fluctuate that much which elminates heat cycle fatigue.

Because of the extremely low temperatures, electronics are going to last a whole lot longer.

You are also not going to have to deal with near as much dust as you would on a planet.

Friction wear is going to be a lot less with zero gravity.

It is lot more difficult to make something that will hold up to all the extra stress and wear causing climate and other conditions here on Earth.
 
Exavior said:
IF the car makers wanted to make a care that never or very rarely broke down they could, but why would they? They can get you on parts, on labor on warranty... That is money.

So they aren't going to want to move away from the current model.
Click to expand...

Wut?
Yes, I miss the good old days when cars were made of wood and you had to hand crank that shit to start it. But they didn't make 'em worth a damn, and now I have to drive this shitty lexus?
 
Well considering it was another successful mission for the books this isn't a huge bummer. However , with the budget constraints being placed on NASA its sad that they pushed so hard to re-purpose this sat in order to use it for other research.

Maybe we should stop giving the military industrial complex $700 Billion a year and consider giving more to NASA to actually fund the advancement of our scientific knowledge as a species versus making better killing machines..
 
octoberasian said:
If I recall, Kepler found around 3500-plus candidates and only around 160 to 170 have been confirmed or analyzed.

So, yeah, scientists are going to be busy poring through all that data that Kepler has gathered.

It's unfortunate we do not have the means anymore to go there and repair it. We're going to have similar problems when the James-Webb Space Telescope is launched in a few more years.
Click to expand...

The JWST has been built from the ground up to survive for quite a long time. Hubble was built to be upgraded , part the reason it lasted as long as it has. However we know A LOT about what it takes now , thanks to Hubble's failures at the beginning , as to what it takes to built a very reliable and long lasting sat.

The JWST will be a total revolution like Hubble was/is. Thanks to its incredibly large light gathering capability and the fact that it can see in a wavelength that is much more useful for looking into the Universe and it won't require liquid hydrogen to do so (it'll be beyond the moon in constant shadow in a fixed L2 point)

We landed a nuclear car on Mars , trust me.. that was A LOT harder than getting the JWST where it needs to be. We've being incredibly successful getting sats exactly where we need them , time after time after time and the JWST will not be any different. Frankly the JWST is going to provide me with a career once its launched and functional. Its going to create a lot of careers , just like Hubble did. I'm so glad it got built and wasn't scrapped like various other ambitious Hubble replacements.

Can't wait to start doing research with its findings. Its one of the very few things that keeps me excited to be in the field I'm in.
 
cyclone3d said:
The temperature is not going to fluctuate that much which elminates heat cycle fatigue.

Because of the extremely low temperatures, electronics are going to last a whole lot longer.
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Actually the temperature in space varies quite a bit, to somewhere like 250+° if the Sun is shining on it, to -300° if it's in a shadow. I know it has a sunshade but still.


It is lot more difficult to make something that will hold up to all the extra stress and wear causing climate and other conditions here on Earth.
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You also don't have the protection of the Earth's magnetic field from high energy charged particles, or an atmosphere against any sort of micro particles.

Space is far from ideal of a place. I seem to recall some 20 years ago when I did short stint working at NASA, I worked on the Spitzer Space Telescope while it was still in the planning stages, I asked why they have a 386 processor working on it instead of a fast pentium (whatever the latest one was) in it. And I got a quick lesson on dangers of space, they harden the CPUs against radiation first, but also because more advanced processors/components have pathways that are so close together that if any sort of cosmic ray (super fast charged particle) hits it, there's a much higher chance it would wipe out a ton of things and make it ineffective, where as the older processors used older techniques (obviously) that didn't use such tiny traces in them.
 
Godmachine said:
The JWST will be a total revolution like Hubble was/is. Thanks to its incredibly large light gathering capability and the fact that it can see in a wavelength that is much more useful for looking into the Universe and it won't require liquid hydrogen to do so (it'll be beyond the moon in constant shadow in a fixed L2 point)
Click to expand...
Since it's instruments (I think there are 4??) work primarily in the infra-red with one in the far infrared I thought they still needed to keep it cool, the shadow being able to keep it cold enough but not quite there.
 
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