je.st

Home › kepler

Tag: kepler

NASA resurrects planet-hunting Kepler, replaces broken parts with magical Sun power

2013-11-27 21:30:21| Extremetech

Over the past year, we've told the sad story of NASA's Kepler space observatory, and how the failure of two vital components have resulted in the sad and premature retirement of humanity's best tool for spotting Earth-like planets elsewhere in the universe. Just when all hope seemed lost, though, NASA has approved an ingenious plan to bring Kepler back online -- a novel, never-before-seen technique that uses the Sun's constant bombarding of photons upon Kepler's solar panels to keep the telescope pointed in the right direction.

Tags: power parts sun broken

Kepler: 20% of Sun-like stars have habitable planets, alien life Drake equation finally has a leg to stand on

2013-11-06 15:37:55| Extremetech

The Kepler space observatory says there should be about 8.8 billion potentially habitable planets in the Milky Way. That has big implications for the search for life, and much more.

Tags: to on life stand

RIP Kepler: NASA gives up fixing the planet-hunting space telescope

2013-08-16 13:32:06| Extremetech

Three months after Kepler was crippled by a second failed gyroscope, NASA has decided to cease attempts at fixing the space telescope. NASA is now looking at whether scientific data can still be gathered by Kepler, despite its severely limited functionality, or whether the poor telescope should just be left to drift into space.

Tags: space rip nasa fixing

Nvidia demos Tegra 5 (Logan): Kepler finally comes to mobile, and its amazing

2013-07-25 15:24:41| Extremetech

Nvidia has taken the wraps off the Logan (Tegra 5) SoC. Nvidia isn't talking about the CPU yet (it's probably Cortex-A15, like Tegra 4), but the GPU... oh the GPU is a mobile version of Kepler that blows every other mobile graphics solution out of the water. Mobile Kepler can match the performance of the iPad 4's GPU while consuming one-third of the power. Perhaps more importantly, though, mobile Kepler finally brings feature/API parity to PCs, next-gen consoles, and smartphones.

Tags: its mobile finally amazing