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

NASA has more active deep space systems

[Anonymous Coward]

than most people have on their home networks, including some nerds.

Add in the missions for partners of NASA and the communications systems can get crowded.

Re:Someday

[Gavagai80]

Getting to orbit is remarkably cheap, except for the cost of throwing away the vehicle.

The fuel for a Falcon 9 is about $200K per flight, compared to ~$15K per hour in fuel for a 747 airliner. 250,000 lbs max payload for a 747 vs 50,000 lbs for a Falcon 9, so let's multiply $200K by 5... but then a representative normal 747 flight may be 5 hours, so multiply $15K by 5 too. That tells us that an orbital flight costs about 13 times more per lb in fuel than a 747.

So spaceflight need only be 13x more expensive than a typical 5 hour airplane flight, if we can stop throwing away the vehicles. That's not much at all, considering we're comparing to a mode of transport so popular that there are over a hundred thousand flights per day around the world.

And getting anywhere beyond Earth orbit is practically free once you get past escape velocity, depending how patient you are.

And the vacuum of space is, in some ways, a much more forgiving environment for equipment than the Earth. Sure you need some radiation hardening, but not having to worry about weather or geologic or biological processes sure helps.