Steinn has a nice post about the sudden ending of the Kepler mission, due to a crucial component failure. As he notes:
“Kepler has discovered almost 3,000 planetary candidates, of which about 100 have been confirmed through a variety of techniques, and, statistically, most of the rest are likely to be real planets.
Kepler has not quite found earth like planets in the habitable zone, yet.
It is heartbreakingly close to doing so.”
Sad to see, especially at a time when science is being hurt so badly by continued funding cuts, and devastating slashes due to the sequester. (See Matt’s post on this.)
-cvj
