Philibuster

So the Kepler telescope that is currently high above our heads searching for exoplanets that might harbor life has a blind spot. One of the chips that hold two CCDs has failed. This puts a nice big old blank spot in its’ field of view and since the spacecraft rotates around that blind spot travels as well causing problems around a larger area of space. It’s not the worse thing but it sucks and I hope that NASA is able to fix it. Don’t really want a planet to pass in front of its star during a blind spot. It might take another year for it to show up again.

I’m busy watching the count down to kepler tonight. Let’s all hope it goes well because kepler looks like it’s going to do some really cool stuff.

Update: Less than an hour to go now. Everything looks good. I always like listening to the chatter going on. If you can’t figure out where to go to see this stuff go here. That’s the link for NASA tv. Cool stuff.

Update: Everything is still go for launch. There’s about 12 mins to go now.

Update: four mintues now. It’s mostly automatic from this point.

Update: Launch went good so far. It’s not quite over yet. Not until the spacecraft is working and in place. But so far so good.