3/11/2023 0 Comments Kepler telescope![]() ![]() The only problem was that this system didn't have any place for other worlds aside from the Moon and possibly the Sun. Thomas Aquinas had produced a self-contained, consistent cosmology that explained how the universe worked. This sounds a bit silly and clumsy when boiled down to a couple of sentences, but centuries of refinement from Aristotle to St. This was essentially the universe's rubbish disposal with everything earthy and profane being drawn to the center and everything rarefied and pure rising to Heaven. Inside of all of these spheres, at the very center, was the Earth. The outer shell of this sphere held the fixed stars and inside this were a series of concentric crystal shells for each of the five known planets, the Sun, and the Moon. Putting things very simply, the universe was conceived as being a huge crystal sphere surrounded by Heaven. Mankind lived in a neatly ordered, confined universe with defined rules and surprisingly small dimensions. Previous to Galileo, accepted scientific ideas didn't leave any room for worlds other than the Earth and the Moon. ![]() Galileo's crude spyglass is easily out-performed today by a cheap pair of binoculars, but his observations over the course of a couple of months in 1609 revolutionized our conceptions of the universe. In the case of Kepler, the impact may be the greatest in over four hundred years. Changing the universeĪn astronomical survey may seem about as earthshaking as doing a population count of potato bugs, but the impact of the Kepler mission is an example of something simple having profound impact on human history. To answer this, Kepler, also known as Discovery Mission 10, was designed to carry out a survey of one section of the Milky Way to look for exoplanets, in particular ones in the habitable zone the size of the Earth or smaller, and to provide data to show how many of the hundreds of billions of stars in the galaxy have these planets. In fact, so little was known about planets outside of the solar system that it wasn't even certain if they were commonplace. To put this into perspective, before Kepler only a handful of exoplanets were confirmed. According to NASA, Kepler and its extended K2 mission has so far found 2,723 exoplanets, with 30 of these confirmed to sit in the habitable zone around their stars where liquid water – and, possibly, life – can exist. Since it was launched in 2009, Kepler has become arguably the most important telescope since Galileo trained his eight- or nine-power telescope on the skies in 1609. That's a lot to load on what is essentially a giant camera, but Kepler is a one very exceptional Box Brownie. But with its record of finding thousands of planets beyond our solar system, it might one day end up in the history books as the robotic equivalent of Christopher Columbus or Captain Cook – and with just as much impact on how we see ourselves and our world. Now that Kepler is approaching its final days, let's look back at its remarkable nine-year career and how it has changed our views about the universe.įor all its success, Kepler isn't exactly a household name and it certainly doesn't loom large in popular culture. Because the propellants needed to keep the unmanned exoplanet hunter pointed in the right direction are running out, mission control put the spacecraft into a state of semi-hibernation that allowed it to transmit stored data before beginning a final phase of observations. On June 6, NASA announced that the Kepler space observatory was reaching the end of its life.
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