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

[macraig]

I hope that network includes some "open" satellites with which anyone can communicate, like public webcams on the Internet now.

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.

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.

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.

Re:Someday

[quenda]

Escape speed, in any direction other than straight at the ground, is enough to make sure you never fall down again

A rocket could fly straight up until reaching escape velocity, but that would be a very bad idea as you would be fighting gravity the whole time.
In reality, rockets fire their engines as close to horizontal (perpendicular to gravity) as practical.

See these diagrams of orbital transfers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

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.

Question

[Knuckles]

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

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:Waste!

[lgw]

All these billions to study space and there is not a single return for all the expense.

I find it far more interesting than the billions spent on Marvel movies.

Re:Astroarchaeology?

[mhotchin]

- out of manoeuvering fuel, so it can't point the radio dishes properly.
- a fault could develop that could leave the transmitters screaming into the void, damaging or blinding other probes or earth based DSN dishes.