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NASA's Planet-Hunting Kepler Space Telescope Is Running Out of Fuel (mashable.com)
Charlie Sobeck, the system engineer for the Kepler space telescope mission, said in a NASA statement that Kepler is running low on gas. According to Sobekc, it only has "several months" before it reaches the end of the its life. Mashable reports: NASA's Kepler spacecraft has been peering deep into the Milky Way galaxy for nearly a decade. It has spotted over 2,500 confirmed planets orbiting distant stars, and over 2,500 more possible worlds are waiting to be confirmed. Thirty of these confirmed planets live inside their host stars' habitable zones, places where liquid water could exist like it does on Earth. NASA placed the Kepler telescope 94 million miles away from Earth, in an orbit around the sun. This way, Earth's gravity and reflected light don't interfere with Kepler's precise measurements of distant planets. Out there, in the void, it's extremely unlikely that Kepler will become a threatening piece of space junk that could pose collision hazards to other satellites. Although Kepler will soon be spent and left to its long, lonely orbit in space, the spacecraft will soon be replaced by another exoplanet-hunting space telescope, NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). TESS is set to launch into space on April 16.
If you need to build, use and scrap a truck just to fuel up that car, springing for a newer better model instead might be indeed the better course of action.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Why are people so fucking stupid with this.? Kepler is almost 100 million miles away. Idiots here talking about refueling, the fucking space shuttle only goes 400 miles, humans really only go 400 miles, outside of a whole bunch of moon missions that supposedly went off w/o a hitch, but now it's too hard. It's too hard. Too expensive. The moon is 250,000 miles away. Kepler is 95,000,000 miles away. Can you spot the problem?
My car runs out of fuel in 10 km, I should buy another one.
Better car analogy: Your 10 year old electric car with 300k miles on it, torn seats, and a shot suspension, has a shot battery that won't hold a charge anymore. Do you spend $50k on getting the battery replaced, or spend $40k on a brand new electric car with newer tech?