Kepler Space Telescope unfixable

[kinetic (Steve)]

I saw this unfortunate news today,
http://science.time.com/2013/08/16/t...ion-continues/
I didn't realise there was a problem with it.
But....oh what a legacy it leaves...

quote:
But the true quarry, as Borucki has stated openly from the beginning, was to find planets like Earth—about the same size as our home world, orbiting stars like the Sun, and in the “Goldilocks zone” in their solar system where temperatures are not too hot, not too cold, but just right for life to be possible. Kepler hasn’t found any of these yet, but it has come awfully close: it’s found Earth-size (and smaller) planets, but not in the Goldilocks Zone, and it’s found planets a bit bigger than Earth with just the right temperatures—but they’re orbiting stars dimmer than the Sun. Still, when scientists extrapolate from what the probe has already found, it’s clear that our galaxy conservatively holds at least 17 billion worlds about the size of Earth

Steve

[rogerco (Roger)]

Very sad, but as they said on the news item I saw (PBS) the original mission was completed and the current time was extra. They also apparently have a few years of data that they haven't analyzed yet so maybe they will find something.

[glend (Glen)]

There was a story last week, or maybe the week before, about funding being made available to reprocess all the Kepler data acquired to look for possible 'signs of life' ie smaller than planetary objects, like large space ships moving across face of the stars.

SETI lives on.

[xelasnave]

The prospect of other worlds similar to Earth is very interesting. I fdont think I could handle news of observations of large space ships. Things have moved a long way forward since I saw Sputnik when 10 years old. Maybe we are not alone scarey if we are the only ones.
I hope they dont sit on the data yet to be looked at too long. I did hear of data not being usable because computers had moved on but I dont know if they could face similar problems these days.
Most interesting thanks for posting.
Alex