The Kepler spacecraft, which has revolutionized our understanding of the vast number of exoplanets beyond our solar system, has been damaged beyond repair, NASA officials said today.
The space agency reported the end of the observing phase of the Kepler mission today, saying that one of three working rotating wheels that helped keep the spacecraft steady as it collected images cannot be repaired.
Kepler stopped working properly in May, and NASA engineers have tried without success to fix the problem since then. "The engineering tests have been completed, and we do not believe we can recover" the third wheel, said Paul Hertz, NASA's astrophysics director.
He said the Kepler team will now determine whether the spacecraft and its telescope can be used for other space research that has been proposed since the problem was first reported. That includes studying asteroids, comets, supernovae, and some large planets in our galaxy.
Kepler's in a heliocentric orbit that gets further and further away from earth (well until earth catches up again), not in earth orbit, so the Shuttle wouldn't have been able to retrieve it anyway.
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I really hope that the James Webb never encounters a problem like this.
Kepler is one thing, it is $550 million spacecraft and has had enough time to make an immense number of discoveries.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be ~$10 billion. It will be placed at the L2 Lagrange point which is 1.5 million km from Earth and not a good place to have to go to fix something.
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I really hope that the James Webb never encounters a problem like this.
Kepler is one thing, it is $550 million spacecraft and has had enough time to make an immense number of discoveries.
The James Webb Space Telescope will be ~$10 billion. It will be placed at the L2 Lagrange point which is 1.5 million km from Earth and not a good place to have to go to fix something.
Prediction: The James Webb will add billions of years to the known age of the universe. can't wait for this puppy.
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That'd be pretty surprising, James Webb would have to discover something completely new or different to get a 15% change in the universe's age. James Webb will be able to see further back in time closer to when the first stars were forming but the Planck observes the CMBR which is as far back as we can see and the age measured by that is pretty accurate.
James Webb would have to change one of the foundations of the current model of the universe to change the age.
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That'd be pretty surprising, James Webb would have to discover something completely new or different to get a 15% change in the universe's age. James Webb will be able to see further back in time closer to when the first stars were forming but the Planck observes the CMBR which is as far back as we can see and the age measured by that is pretty accurate.
James Webb would have to change one of the foundations of the current model of the universe to change the age.
I won't be surprized at all, even hubble is finding funky things that make you go hmmm.
The age of the universe has been calculated independently to pretty precise values.
It's entirely possible that some new information may come along to prove that the universe is older than what we currently think it is, but the James Webb isn't the kind of instrument that is likely to do it. It would take a ton of data about something we've never previously seen to change what we think of the age of the universe, and that's not likely to be provided by another (granted vastly improved) optical telescope. It may find some strange annomolies that warrant further study, but what you posted there isn't really what anyone would consider good evidence that the universe is older than we think it is, just a strange problem that needs to be re-looked at. Heck the article that you posted, lays out exactly how using hubble (a more advanced telescope than they have previously used to observe the star) was used to bring the age estimate of that star into a range of error that works with the current age of the universe. It's entirely likely that James Webb will be used in this way, to explain anomalies, and fix the problems, rather than find more of them.
If we are going to vastly change our estimate of the age of the universe, it'll be because someone comes up with a workable theory that does away with dark matter, or dark energy, or figures out the mechanism by which those two things work, something James Webb isn't likely to do.
I'd be willing to give you some pretty heavy odds against James Webb vastly altering our estimate of the age of the universe, and I'm pretty sure most people who actually do that kind of thing for a living would too.
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Sure enough, the telescope revealed that most galaxies exhibit such a “red shift” - and, moreover, that the extent of the red shift became greater as the galaxies became more distant. The only conclusion was that the universe was expanding. From the point of view of the inhabitants of any one of its galaxies, it looked as if your neighbours were rushing away from you.
This idea might sound humdrum. But it marked the dawn of a revolutionary new view of the nature, origin, and fate of the universe, suggesting that billions of years ago, the universe must have been far denser than it is now, and that it started in a Big Bang.
Now that conventional thinking has been turned on its head in a paper by Prof Christof Wetterich at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He points out that the tell-tale light emitted by atoms is also governed by the masses of their constituent particles, notably their electrons. The way these absorb and emit light would shift towards the blue part of the spectrum if atoms were to grow in mass, and to the red if they lost it.
Because the frequency or “pitch” of light increases with mass, Prof Wetterich argues that masses could have been lower long ago. If they had been constantly increasing, the colours of old galaxies would look red-shifted - and the degree of red shift would depend on how far away they were from Earth. “None of my colleagues has so far found any fault [with this],” he says.
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But the pattern is approaching a precise number it would appear.
Or you can look at the numbers and see we haven't had a new powerful telescope since 1990(Hubble), a few new land based ones that see better but they still can't see farther than Hubble(as far as I know)
If claims are correct the Webb could make Hubble look like a $100.00 kids telescope.
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