| Galileo (6) |  |
| Hubble (16) | |
| Kepler (36) | |
| Ptolemy (11) | |
and Johannes Kepler as two of the luminaries mystified by the problem. There have been some incredible esoteric even bizarre explanations;
and includes the latest results from the Kepler mission's hunt for exoplanets. aas. org/meetings/aas217 10 14 january Researchers meet in Paris to discuss the status of the Planck mission,
California. sites. agu. org/fallmeeting5-9 december The first conference on the scientific results from the Kepler exoplanet mission takes place at the NASA Ames Research Park, Moffett Field,
A twin Earth NASA's Kepler telescope has reached one of its major mission milestones: discovering another Earth-sized planet.
and from the Kepler mission searching for extrasolar planets, are announced at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences in Reno, Nevada. www. psi. edu/dps12
NASA ponders Kepler s futurenasa just can t quit Kepler. On 15  August, the agency ann  ounced that it would stop trying to revive the failed reaction wheels that gave the planet-hunting telescope its precise pointing ability.
Kepler scientists will sort through the proposals and decide by 1 Â November which ones,
To secure funding from the space agency, the Kepler team will have to show that the studies could not be done by other telescopes.
This will be no easy task especially given that engineers are not sure how well Kepler can perform with just two of its four spinning reaction wheels,
"We re in a real quandary, says Kepler principal investigator Bill Borucki at NASA s Ames Research center in Moffett Field, California."
"We just don t know what Kepler can do. With three working wheels (a fourth was a spare),
Kepler was able to exactly counter  balance the persistent push of sunlight, locking on to targets with such precision that light from a particular star always fell on the same tiny fraction of an individual pixel.
a different telescope, says Kepler scientist William Welsh of San diego State university in California. Kepler s drift could be minimized by keeping it pointed in the same plane in which the craft orbits the Sun. But that presents a complication.
Some of the best science is expected to come from follow-up observations of the field of about 150,000 stars that Kepler has been focused on,
and that star field does not lie in the plane. In one proposal offered up by Welsh and his colleagues,
when they pass in front of their parent star they produce a dip in light that can be detected by Kepler even in its compromised state.
which Kepler has recorded only a few transits those that take more than a year to orbit their star.
but Welsh suggests that it might also be possible for Kepler to add statistical significance to Earth-sized candidates for
Kepler s drift could be used to map out the different light responses of the pixels. That calibration,
if detailed enough, could be enough for Kepler to resume its hunt for Earth analogues,
We just don t know what Kepler can do. Daniel Fabrycky, an astronomer at the University of Chicago in Illinois, has an alternative follow-up study in mind.
Like Welsh, Fabrycky wants Kepler to zero in on planetary systems with long orbits, for which the full cycle of these transit-timing variations has not yet been seen.
putting Kepler to work not as a planet hunter, but as a sentinel for near-Earth objects, including asteroids several hundred metres in diameter that might be on a collision course with Earth.
A survey of space rocks would take advantage of Kepler s large field of view. And at least part of the study could be completed with Kepler looking for targets within its orbital plane,
so as to optimize its pointing. Gould has proposed another scheme, in which Kepler would survey stars towards the Milky way s central bulge for signs of planets,
using a technique known as microlensing. Microlensing relies on a prediction of Einstein s theory of general relativity:
By observing microlens planets using Kepler and ground-based telescopes at the same time, differences in transit duration and brightness emerge that can yield the planets mass.
If any of the proposals recommended by the Kepler team seems worthwhile to NASA, they will be examined early next year by a review panel of external scientists.
At that stage, a repurposed Kepler would face its biggest hurdle a competition for the limited pot of funds against nine other astrophysics missions,
Not everyone is rooting for Kepler. Doug Finkbeiner, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wants NASA to support missions that are still healthy.
I hope we let Kepler die, he says
Forest management plans in a tanglein the middle of metropolitan San francisco stands an army and many Bay Area residents want it to stay garrisoned there.
One major push along that front was the $600-million Kepler mission launched in 2009.
#A Kepler research veteran Fabrycky began his UCHICAGO faculty appointment last October. Fabrycky precisely measures the timing of transits the mini eclipses that planets cause as they pass in front of their stars.
So far Kepler has confirmed 105 planet discoveries to its credit and has identified 2740 planet candidates.
As a postdoctoral scientist at the University of California Santa cruz two years ago Fabrycky was a member of a team that discovered six planets orbiting a single star called Kepler-11.#
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