NASA Decommissions the Kepler Space Telescope (space.com) 60
Late last month, NASA announced that it would be retiring the Kepler space telescope after nearly ten years of service -- double its initial mission life. Now, as Space.com reports, the planet-hunting telescope has been officially decommissioned, "beaming 'goodnight' commands to the sun-orbiting observatory." From the report: "Kepler's team disabled the safety modes that could inadvertently turn systems back on, and severed communications by shutting down the transmitters," NASA officials wrote in a statement today (Nov. 16). "Because the spacecraft is slowly spinning, the Kepler team had to carefully time the commands so that instructions would reach the spacecraft during periods of viable communication."
The final commands were sent from Kepler's operations center at the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, NASA officials said. The commands got to the spacecraft via NASA's Deep Space Network, the system of big radio dishes the space agency uses to keep in touch with its far-flung probes.
The final commands were sent from Kepler's operations center at the University of Colorado Boulder's Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, NASA officials said. The commands got to the spacecraft via NASA's Deep Space Network, the system of big radio dishes the space agency uses to keep in touch with its far-flung probes.
Someday (Score:5, Interesting)
It won’t be in my lifetime, but I hope that - some day - we really do have an honest-to-goodness deep space network.
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I hope that network includes some "open" satellites with which anyone can communicate, like public webcams on the Internet now.
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Re: Someday (Score:1)
So that one day the tech for doing something now impossible will be cheap and commonplace.
Like what happened with GPS and communications satellites.
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I can't possibly imagine why anyone would want to leave Earth!
That's because you have zero imagination and no ability to think beyond your next meal. A starfaring alien civilization would look at someone like you and decide you're not actually 'sentient', you're just a clever animal with lots of toys. Thankfully, however, the Bell Curve is a real thing, and not all of us are on the left side of it like you are.
Re:Someday (Score:5, Interesting)
It wonâ(TM)t be in my lifetime, but I hope that - some day - we really do have an honest-to-goodness deep space network.
Maybe I'm just a depressing old fogie. With that intro, nope. It's just too hard to get out of the gravity well.
Oh, we can DO it, but just barely. We've had the combustion engine moving things around horizontally for a century. We've had air-flight for "nearly" as long, and "Space Flight" (well, there ain't no air, so it's space!) for half that. We've visited the moon in person, and other planets by proxy. We've even sent two crafts into interplanetary space, outside Sol's gravity well. WHEEE!
Going vertically is just much harder than horizontally, both equipment-wise, energy-wise, and intelligence-wise. (Any idiot can drive a car now-a-days, but back at the beginning, you had to know how to start it and crank it by hand, how to light the lights (candles!), and the correct fuel to add.) I'd be curious to see how many square feet -- meters, if you're drinking tea -- in livable space we've sent to the moon, and then just around Earth orbit. The moon/Mars isn't going to be a tourist destination anytime in the next 200 years without an energy breakthrough. Yeah, we can ship a few people someplace far away AKA Captain Cook (or was that Captain Bligh?) but for having people living in Tombstone, Arizona, Mars is unbelievable, never mind having a McD, WalM, or Micky there to visit when you're bored.
We can maybe go get Asteroids (I loved that game when it first came out) for minerals and metal, but we're still trading energy for it. Until we can solve the energy problem (remember in the '50s when All Electric Medallion Homes were the rage? Power was going to be "Too cheap to meter" -- a prediction for a fission utopia. It'll be here Any Day Now.)
Back in the 70s I was ready to go, excited about the moon landings and wanted us to go further. But further is a LOOONG way away, and that's just the nearest planets. We're better off Mars-forming our children's bodies instead of trying to Terraform Mars.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to see us try. I'd love all of the accidental scientific and technology fallouts that occur while producing all of that. I'd like my tax money to go TOWARDS that. But unless you're a large handful of specialists, you're not going to make it out of the atmosphere, never mind our local well. Who knows, though, maybe Andy Griffith [imdb.com] can save us.
Oh, I'm sure we'll eventually have "an honest-to-goodness deep space network" but it'll always be machines on the far end.
Sorry for being so negative. Maybe the younger kids, standing on the shoulders of giants, can see better. Link [youtu.be] Or, maybe not.
Re:Someday (Score:5, Interesting)
Going vertically is just much harder than horizontally,
Actually, while orbital launch rockets start off vertical, they put most of their effort into horizontal velocity.
Vertical is not the problem. We could easily and cheaply fly hundreds of km up if the air did not go away!
The bigger problem though is not the height in a vacuum, but the velocity needed to not fall down again, and that velocity is parallel to the earth's surface.
So while lack of air in space makes getting up a bit harder (rockets not jets), it makes the far bigger task of achieving orbital velocity possible. And once you are in orbit, climbing higher becomes in theory a lot easier. You can use slower but far more efficient ion-drives.
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Umm, no. Escape speed, in any direction other than straight at the ground, is enough to make sure you never fall down again (on Earth, if you're above terrestrial escape speed, and pointed at Jupiter...).
Now, if you're talking sub-escape speeds, you're substantially correct....
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go fast enough horizontally so that when you fall towards the earth, you continuously miss.
I wonder if Douglas Adams knew anything about orbital mechanics?
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Escape speed, in any direction other than straight at the ground, is enough to make sure you never fall down again
A rocket could fly straight up until reaching escape velocity, but that would be a very bad idea as you would be fighting gravity the whole time.
In reality, rockets fire their engines as close to horizontal (perpendicular to gravity) as practical.
See these diagrams of orbital transfers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Someday (Score:5, Insightful)
Getting to orbit is remarkably cheap, except for the cost of throwing away the vehicle.
The fuel for a Falcon 9 is about $200K per flight, compared to ~$15K per hour in fuel for a 747 airliner. 250,000 lbs max payload for a 747 vs 50,000 lbs for a Falcon 9, so let's multiply $200K by 5... but then a representative normal 747 flight may be 5 hours, so multiply $15K by 5 too. That tells us that an orbital flight costs about 13 times more per lb in fuel than a 747.
So spaceflight need only be 13x more expensive than a typical 5 hour airplane flight, if we can stop throwing away the vehicles. That's not much at all, considering we're comparing to a mode of transport so popular that there are over a hundred thousand flights per day around the world.
And getting anywhere beyond Earth orbit is practically free once you get past escape velocity, depending how patient you are.
And the vacuum of space is, in some ways, a much more forgiving environment for equipment than the Earth. Sure you need some radiation hardening, but not having to worry about weather or geologic or biological processes sure helps.
Re:Someday (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, we can ship a few people someplace far away AKA Captain Cook (or was that Captain Bligh?) but for having people living in Tombstone, Arizona, Mars is unbelievable, never mind having a McD, WalM, or Micky there to visit when you're bored.
Well, even in his most generous projections of massive reuse at scale in the far future Musk said "The cost of moving to Mars ultimately could drop below $100,000" which is a bit outside my budget for a burger and it's for a one way trip. So yeah the people who expect warp drive-like bouncing around the Solar system have watched too much sci-fi. Same with the people thinking we have the capability of terraforming Mars.
That said, getting to LEO is a lot of the effort to get into space and the difference between TLI and going to other planets even smaller. According to this chart [external-preview.redd.it]
Earth to LEO: 9.4 km/s
Earth to TLI: 9.4 + 2.44 + 0.68 km/s = 12.5 km/s
Earth to Moon: 12.5 + 0.14 + 0.68 + 1.73 = 15.1 km/s
Earth to Mars: 12.5 + 0.09 + 0.39 + 0.67 + 0.34 + 0.4 + 0.7 + 3.8 = 18.9 km/s
Towards Mars you can use aerobraking, which puts the rocket requirements more in the ballpark of the Moon. Granted getting off Mars again is quite a bit harder but it's not some impossible goal from a technological point of view with an Apollo 2 program and a Saturn VI. The challenge is finding some economically viable path to make it happen, but with SpaceX aiming for the third launch of a Block 5 rocket this year they've hopefully turned the corner on that and the 4th and 5th is not that far behind. And 2019 will hopefully see a crew rating of the F9 too.
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"The cost of moving to Mars ultimately could drop below $100,000"
Yes, that would be a big expense for most of us, but people whose companies decide they should fly first class often spend 10% of that on a single flight. The orbit-to-anywhere part of the trip is substantially cheaper too, so if transport costs really get that low you might well bop around the solar system on business, just not so much down to the surface.
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We've even sent two crafts into interplanetary space, outside Sol's gravity well.
"Interstellar", I think you meant to say, and there are four - Pioneer 10 & 11 and Voyager 1 & 2, although Voyager 1 is the only one confirmed to have passed the heliopause. New Horizons will join the bunch in 25-30 years, as will the third stage of its launch vehicle.
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What defines "out of the Sun's gravity well"? All six objects I mentioned are traveling faster than the solar escape velocity, and thus the Sun's gravitational influence is no longer sufficient to slow any of them enough to pull them into a solar orbit. Gravity doesn't just stop at a given distance, so deceleration from the Sun's gravity will continue to become smaller and smaller until they encounter something that has a greater gravitational influence than the Sun at that distance. In 20,000 years or s
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Personally, I would not have said the objects are outside of the Sun's gravity well.
I wouldn't have either, but I was responding to another poster that did regarding the number of missions that have reached interstellar space. I wasn't intending to make a statement regarding the Sun's gravity well. :-)
It's been an interesting discussion, but largely academic, since Homo sapiens may very well never achieve it by any of the definitions presented thus far unless we can come up with some seriously kick-ass ne
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The heliopause is where the Sun's solar winds stop from being dominant compared to the interstellar winds.
The existence of Oort's cloud [wikipedia.org] extending a thousand times further than the heliopause shows that there's still a long way to go before escaping the gravity well.
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Space elevators show promise. They've been around in Sci-Fi genre for a long time, but people are beginning to give them serious consideration.
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(Any idiot can drive a car now-a-days, but back at the beginning, you had to know how to start it and crank it by hand, how to light the lights (candles!), and the correct fuel to add.)
Not that I've ever owned a Model A or a Model T.. but my father was interested in them, and I believe in his youth owned at least one or two of them, and in his old age, had a restored Model A roadster.. but I digress. So far as I remember, not only did you have to know how (and have the physical fitness) to hand-crank the engine to start it, you also had to understand how to manually adjust the spark advance, the fuel mixture ratio, when to use the choke, and of course the 'transmission', such as it was, w
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At this point in time, my feeling is that the real obstacle to humans getting off this planet is humans themselves; we've dug ourselves a hole quite deep, what with human-caused climate change, and of course the fact that we can't even manage to get along with ourselves ("you look different than I do so I hate you", "you believe in the Invisible Sky-God different than I do, so I hate you", "you're not heterosexual, therefore I hate you", "your politics don't echo mine, therefore I hate you", and
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Who knows, though, maybe Andy Griffith [imdb.com] can save us.
Haha, I remember Salvage 1. Didn’t like it nearly as much as Quark [imdb.com], although neither one garnered much of an audience.
NASA has more active deep space systems (Score:2, Insightful)
than most people have on their home networks, including some nerds.
Add in the missions for partners of NASA and the communications systems can get crowded.
Re: Someday (Score:2)
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Question (Score:4, Interesting)
Why go to the trouble of shutting everything down and not just leaving it as-is?
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
Found an alternate article that explains: "The most important of these commands is to shut down Kepler's radio transmitters. Though it's in a safe orbit about 94 million mi (151 million km) from the Earth, it still poses a hazard to navigation – not in the sense that it could collide with another spacecraft, but because its radio beam could accidentally blind another probe or even the highly sensitive ground antennae of the Deep Space Network." (source [newatlas.com])
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Thanks
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All these billions to study space and there is not a single return for all the expense.
I find it far more interesting than the billions spent on Marvel movies.
Astroarchaeology? (Score:2)
Also, it occurs to me: if human civilization manages (somehow) to survive long enough to move out into our planetary system, derelict hardware like Kepler, left to orbit indefinitely, will become great 'astroarchaeology' finds for later generations, brought back and restored as museum exhibits.
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- out of manoeuvering fuel, so it can't point the radio dishes properly.
- a fault could develop that could leave the transmitters screaming into the void, damaging or blinding other probes or earth based DSN dishes.
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Why not send a probe with fuel to refuel it?
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