Clever Apes, a Busted Telescope & the Adjacent Possible
by Amos Zeeberg
Jun 19, 2013
3 minutes
he Kepler spacecraft had a pretty good run. Launched in 2009, it soon settled into its intended orbit around the Sun, trained its image sensors up at a patch of sky about as big as your fist held at arm’s length, and began watching, which it’s been doing ever since. Kepler’s job is to find exoplanets that cross, or “transit,” in front of the stars that they orbit. It’s a very tough job: The stars are far away and very bright, while the planets are entirely dark, and the most Earth-like ones
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