Iconic Planet-Hunting Kepler Telescope Wakes Up, Phones Home (space.com)

Kepler, which has discovered about 70 percent of the 3,800 known exoplanets to date, woke up from a four-week hibernation yesterday and has begun beaming data home, just as planned, NASA officials announced today. From a report: Kepler had been sleeping in an attempt to save thruster fuel, which is running very low. Mission team members wanted to make sure the spacecraft had enough propellant left to orient its antenna toward Earth for yesterday's data dump. Far-flung NASA spacecraft send information back to mission controllers via the agency's Deep Space Network (DSN), a system of radio dishes around the globe. The sun-orbiting Kepler's latest allotted DSN window opened yesterday, agency officials have said.

Comments

Re:Non-propellent based space travel

[DRJlaw]

However good old physics shows that an electric motor may be able to spin and rotate a space craft [but] there isn't much it can do for course, and prevent it from leaving an orbit.

'However good old physics shows that an electric motor may be able to spin and rotate a space craft..."

What do you mean "may"? Doesn't physics tell you things like that for sure?

What about PUSHING a spacecraft? You can spin all you want, you're still slowly falling towards the thing you're orbiting. HST has no propellant to maintain its altitude, so the last part of every servicing mission was to use available propellant on the shuttle to throw it a few more Km back up.

Good old physics also shows that nothing in the universe is able to force a Slashdot reader to read and comprehend the comments that they are replying to.

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