Kepler Results

http://kepler.nasa.gov/about/history.html

The eighth item on the list details a cost cutting strategy of eliminating the antenna gimbal costing about a day per month.

I doubt the antenna data rate can download a months worth of thousands of high rez pictures in a few minutes!

I was hoping that it could then be pointed to closer in stars to check them for planets. This would be a more poignant search IMHO.

Especially now that TESS is a gonner to (trying not to get impatient here! All projects are important) projects such as the determining yet another layer of the Sun and some X-Rays from Neutron Stars and Black Holes.

TheoA wrote:I doubt the antenna data rate can download a months worth of thousands of high rez pictures in a few minutes!

Forgive me, but does the Kepler photometer send back thousands of high-resolution images of the Cygnus field? Or does it just measure light curves and send those back? I would imagine the later would be much more efficient. I'm not sure quite how that works.

Sirius, you are correct.

Apparently only the relevant 'designated' pixels are downloaded.

Still it should be more than mere minutes.. ...a few hours maybe?

I any case the chances of a secondary mission are pretty dim.

I've heard talk about an extension to the Kepler mission being a possibility. It's target field aside, if Kepler does yield significant finds, maybe they might be granted an extension? I'd love Kepler to last forever, but I realise NASA doesn't exactly have a lot of cash.

However... if Kepler funding will be needed to go to development of SIM or (if my greatest hopes and dreams are realised) TPF, then let it be.

http://kepler.nasa.gov/about/manager.html (July 7th, update)

These resets are unfortunate.

The note says it was a processor reset, same as the last one.

Hopefully it is not a hardware failure.

I assume repairs would be out of the question.

Repairs are out of the question since Kepler is not in LEO, the only 'space' accessible by the crewed space shuttle. Kepler is in a 1 AU solar orbit, continually 'falling behind' the Earth.

Mission manager update

http://kepler.nasa.gov/about/manager.html

Lots of interesting details.

They are now checking every day for anomalies.

Next down load is delayed to August 20 2009.

An incredible 50 Gbits of data was downloaded on the last link.
IIRC correctly Galileo returned 30 or Gbytes or so over 8 years
admittedly with a crippled antennae!

There is still no info on how long the outage lasted.
The telescope could very easily have been down for a week.

The July 2nd outage detection was resolved a day later. According to the July 7th report, "By late July 3, Kepler had returned to normal science operations." Prior to July 2nd, data was downoaded on June 19th. Assuming it entered safe mode on the 20th and somehow this went undetected, worst case is that all observational data until July 2nd could have been lost. Thanks for posting the updates.

Philw note that the original plan called for weekly checks.

Hopefully they had kept to that plan and only lost a week.

2 weeks would be devastating.

Fully 5% of yearly observation time.

Keeping fingers crossed.

Theo, you are correct. It looks like something under 7 days would be the worst case loss on the safe mode event, given the weekly check schedule.

What I do not understand is how they can defer the next download to the latter part of August.

They're probably observing now.

Gather data. Transmit. Gather data. Transmit. etc.

Press Conference

Schedule
August 6, Thursday
2 p.m. - Kepler Mission News Conference - HQ (Public and Media Channels)

Optimistic guess: they've found a hot Jupiter.