評論
打印
Kepler Exoplanet Hunter Limps Into Sunset
開普勒天文望遠鏡走向完結
NASA’s best exoplanet hunter is limping into retirement. The Kepler space telescope has discovered more than 130 exoplanets in our galaxy. But it will seek new worlds no more.
NASA最好的行星探索望遠鏡慢慢退役。開普勒望遠鏡已經發現了銀河中超過130顆行星。但是其即將退出歷史舞臺。
Kepler relies on a set of four flywheels to stabilize its pointing and lock onto its target stars. The spacecraft was designed to tolerate one broken wheel, but not two. One gave out last year, and this May the really bad news arrived—a second wheel had failed. The Kepler team says they can’t revive the wheels. So astronomers will rely on ground-based telescopes to look for other worlds until NASA’s next planet hunter, the TESS satellite, launches around 2017.
開普勒望遠鏡依靠四個動量輪穩定拍攝點，鎖定拍攝行星。它被設定為容許一個動量輪故障，但是兩個就不行了。去年有一個動量輪壞掉了，現在又壞了一個。開普勒團隊說他們無法修復這個輪子。因此在下一個天文衛星TESS于2017年發射之前科學家們只能通過地面望遠鏡觀測行星了。
But don’t send Kepler off into the sunset just yet. In an August 15th teleconference, NASA’s Bill Borucki, the mission’s principal investigator, noted that Kepler has loads of data that have yet to be fully searched for planets, including those Earth-like worlds that might host life: “So basically in the next two years, when we complete this analysis, we’ll be able to answer the question that inspired the Kepler mission: Are Earths common or rare in our galaxy?”
但是開普勒衛星尚未完全變為無用之物。8月15日的一次電話會議上，NASA的Bill Borucki，開普勒任務的領頭人物，指出開普勒望遠鏡有大量數據沒有被分析，沒有探索類地行星的存在。所以在接下來的兩年，當我們完成分析，我們就能回答引出開普勒任務的問題：在銀河中地球很普遍呢還是絕無僅有呢？
—John Matson
