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Kepler mission

More Insight on How NASA Might Revive the Kepler Space Telescope

May 16, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter The future of NASA’s Kepler space telescope mission is in doubt, NASA announced yesterday, as it suffered a failure of a second reaction wheel, losing its ability to precisely point to look for planets orbiting other stars. Reaction wheels enable the [...]

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Kepler Planet-Hunting Mission in Jeopardy

May 15, 2013

NASA’s Kepler telescope has lost its ability to precisely point toward stars, putting its exoplanet search in jeopardy. One of the reaction wheels –devices which enable the spacecraft to aim in different directions without firing thrusters – has failed. This is of grave concern because last year reaction wheel #2 failed, and now #4 has [...]

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Could There be 100 Billion Potentially Habitable Planets in the Galaxy?

March 15, 2013

As we’ve reported recently, the likelihood of findings habitable Earth-sized worlds just seems to keep getting better and better. But now the latest calculations from a new paper out this week are almost mind-bending. Using what the authors call a “very careful extrapolation” of the rate of small planets observed around M dwarf stars by [...]

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Smallest Exoplanet Yet Discovered by ‘Listening’ to a Sun-like Star

February 20, 2013

Scientists have discovered a new planet orbiting a Sun-like star, and the exoplanet is the smallest yet found in data from the Kepler mission. The planet, Kepler-37b, is smaller than Mercury, but slightly larger than Earth’s Moon. The planet’s discovery came from a collaboration between Kepler scientists and a consortium of international researchers who employ [...]

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Less Than 1% of Exoplanet Systems Have Intelligent Life, Researchers Say

February 8, 2013

Recent findings say that Earth-like exoplanets could be all around us in our cosmic neighborhood. But how many would be home to intelligent life? A new study estimates that fewer than 1% of transiting exoplanet systems host civilizations technologically advanced enough to send out radio transmissions that could be detected by our current SETI searches. [...]

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