Kepler Mission launch date approaches - now just two more months

Thursday, January 15, 2009


I've written on Kepler a lot already so there's nothing really new to write except that space.com has an article on the upcoming mission today with comments below, which is usually what I find most interesting before an event or mission actually happens. The comments of course are all positive, because there really is nothing negative one can say about a mission like this - it doesn't involve any possible danger to people, the cost is relatively low, and it expects to find earthlike planets in other solar systems, so not a single downside.

Here's a part of the article:

Following launch, Kepler will be nudged into an Earth-trailing heliocentric orbit with a period of 372.5 days. Once on duty and collecting data, the spacecraft rolls every 30 days to align a fixed high-gain antenna to download that month's gathered readings to NASA's Deep Space Network. Kepler also carries out a 90-degree roll every 90 days to keep its solar panels always pointed at the sun, Troeltzsch noted.

Kepler data is to be relayed to the Data Management Center at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, with science data analysis carried out by the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The search for exo-planets in the last decade has escalated from something hardly conceivable to an active and enthusiastic scientific endeavor, said Bill Borucki, the science principal investigator for the Kepler Mission at NASA Ames.

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