NASA Decommissions the Kepler Space Telescope (space.com)

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.

Comments

Re:Question

[Gavagai80]

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)

Re:Someday

[Kjella]

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

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.