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

Someday

[93 Escort Wagon]

It won’t be in my lifetime, but I hope that - some day - we really do have an honest-to-goodness deep space network.

Re:Someday

[grep -v '.*' *]

It wonâ(TM)t be in my lifetime, but I hope that - some day - we really do have an honest-to-goodness deep space network.

Maybe I'm just a depressing old fogie. With that intro, nope. It's just too hard to get out of the gravity well.

Oh, we can DO it, but just barely. We've had the combustion engine moving things around horizontally for a century. We've had air-flight for "nearly" as long, and "Space Flight" (well, there ain't no air, so it's space!) for half that. We've visited the moon in person, and other planets by proxy. We've even sent two crafts into interplanetary space, outside Sol's gravity well. WHEEE!

Going vertically is just much harder than horizontally, both equipment-wise, energy-wise, and intelligence-wise. (Any idiot can drive a car now-a-days, but back at the beginning, you had to know how to start it and crank it by hand, how to light the lights (candles!), and the correct fuel to add.) I'd be curious to see how many square feet -- meters, if you're drinking tea -- in livable space we've sent to the moon, and then just around Earth orbit. The moon/Mars isn't going to be a tourist destination anytime in the next 200 years without an energy breakthrough. 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.

We can maybe go get Asteroids (I loved that game when it first came out) for minerals and metal, but we're still trading energy for it. Until we can solve the energy problem (remember in the '50s when All Electric Medallion Homes were the rage? Power was going to be "Too cheap to meter" -- a prediction for a fission utopia. It'll be here Any Day Now.)

Back in the 70s I was ready to go, excited about the moon landings and wanted us to go further. But further is a LOOONG way away, and that's just the nearest planets. We're better off Mars-forming our children's bodies instead of trying to Terraform Mars.

Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to see us try. I'd love all of the accidental scientific and technology fallouts that occur while producing all of that. I'd like my tax money to go TOWARDS that. But unless you're a large handful of specialists, you're not going to make it out of the atmosphere, never mind our local well. Who knows, though, maybe Andy Griffith can save us.

Oh, I'm sure we'll eventually have "an honest-to-goodness deep space network" but it'll always be machines on the far end.

Sorry for being so negative. Maybe the younger kids, standing on the shoulders of giants, can see better. Link Or, maybe not.

Re:Someday

[quenda]

Going vertically is just much harder than horizontally,

Actually, while orbital launch rockets start off vertical, they put most of their effort into horizontal velocity.

Vertical is not the problem. We could easily and cheaply fly hundreds of km up if the air did not go away!
The bigger problem though is not the height in a vacuum, but the velocity needed to not fall down again, and that velocity is parallel to the earth's surface.

So while lack of air in space makes getting up a bit harder (rockets not jets), it makes the far bigger task of achieving orbital velocity possible. And once you are in orbit, climbing higher becomes in theory a lot easier. You can use slower but far more efficient ion-drives.

Question

[Knuckles]

Why go to the trouble of shutting everything down and not just leaving it as-is?