The Kepler Facebook page says the mission's been extended til FY 16. That's great news!By the way I'm jonesing for some more Kepler press releases and discoveries. One fine day I hope to see a press release with news of a monumental announcement to be made.....
Extending a mission is usually a no-brainer. No more launch or hardware costs, just operations and science. That's why extensions are usually recommended, often until the spacecraft becomes inoperable. That's pretty common sense, if you ask me. I mean, extend it with a reduced budget (or bandwidth allotment, if Deep Space Network time is an issue) if you have to, but there's often no reason to shut it down entirely while it still works. If you have only a tiny budget, then archive the data so later scientists can mine it instead of allowing a perfectly good spacecraft going to waste.
Quote from: Robotbeat on 04/05/2012 07:51 pmExtending a mission is usually a no-brainer. No more launch or hardware costs, just operations and science. That's why extensions are usually recommended, often until the spacecraft becomes inoperable. That's pretty common sense, if you ask me. I mean, extend it with a reduced budget (or bandwidth allotment, if Deep Space Network time is an issue) if you have to, but there's often no reason to shut it down entirely while it still works. If you have only a tiny budget, then archive the data so later scientists can mine it instead of allowing a perfectly good spacecraft going to waste.Well, yes but... NASA spends ~$300 M every year on its existing astrophysics missions, and often the missions have very long lifetimes. If everything is always extend as long as possible, it's hard to get anything new built. As they get older, satellites degrade (radiation damage to CCDs, contamination on optics, etc.), so they lose capability. For survey missions gains are diminishing because each additional year provides always less improvement to SNR, and if you're limited by systematic errors, extending doesn't do any good. For observatory missions the case for extensions is often better. I doubt that cutting back on bandwidth is worthwhile very often, I'd think the science return drops a lot faster than costs. As for just archiving the data, that already happens, for instance Suzaku lost GO funding due to budgetary pressures, so that accepted observers need to find other funding sources (the review recommends returning GO funding at $1M/year). For missions where the US is responsible for operating costs, cutting analysis funding probably doesn't yield huge savings. For instance, the review states that about $25M/year out of the $95M/year Hubble budget is GO funding.I think that a mission extension (at least for an astrophysics mission) is not a no-brainer, and the cost and returns should be carefully considered. It's not even uncommon to end a mission before the spacecraft fails. The previous senior review was particularly harsh, 5 out of 11 missions were terminated. I'd be happy if it's possible to carry out all the recommended mission extensions. I'm just a bit afraid that budget constraints may lead to something bad.
Today the Kepler team announced 2,321 planet candidates, and 10 of them are near earth sized in the habitable zone.