All Space Considered June, 2013

摘要

The June edition of All Space Considered began with the unfortunate news that a reaction wheel failed on the Kepler spacecraft. The Kepler planet-finding spacecraft has been a star attraction at All Space Considered, but in June we had to report the failure of one of the reaction wheels that help point the detector accurately. The discovery of extrasolar planets requires accurate pointing, and by June Kepler had found 3,277 possible planets orbiting stars observed in a very small area of the sky. Detection of more planets is now jeopardized. The mission, however, had already been extended six months beyond its original lifetime, and the number of planets it seems to have found tells us the Milky Way Galaxy is full of planets. In fact, our galaxy has more planets than stars.