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Kepler Exoplanet Hunter Limps Into Sunset
开普勒天文望远镜走向完结
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最好的行星探索望远镜慢慢退役。开普勒望远镜已经发现了银河中超过130颗行星。但是其即将退出历史舞台。
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.
开普勒望远镜依靠四个动量轮稳定拍摄点，锁定拍摄行星。它被设定为容许一个动量轮故障，但是两个就不行了。去年有一个动量轮坏掉了，现在又坏了一个。开普勒团队说他们无法修复这个轮子。因此在下一个天文卫星TESS于2017年发射之前科学家们只能通过地面望远镜观测行星了。
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?”
但是开普勒卫星尚未完全变为无用之物。8月15日的一次电话会议上，NASA的Bill Borucki，开普勒任务的领头人物，指出开普勒望远镜有大量数据没有被分析，没有探索类地行星的存在。所以在接下来的两年，当我们完成分析，我们就能回答引出开普勒任务的问题：在银河中地球很普遍呢还是绝无仅有呢？
—John Matson
