During the excitement of Ming Week, we missed NASA’s announcement about new discoveries from the orbital telescope Kepler. Ever since the reaction wheels used to point Kepler started failing, the plucky space observatory has been in real trouble. Kepler’s mission has been steeply downgraded and it is not the mighty force of discovery it once was…but…a huge amount of data which had been collected prior to these malfunctions had not yet been analyzed. On May 10th, NASA announced that they had gone through this information and discovered another 1284 planets, a handful of which are somewhat Earthlike.
This is more than 30% more planets than we previously knew about, all dumped on the public in one day. It is a phenomenal number: more than a thousand new planets to think about. It is surprising to me that none of these planets have the (approximate) same mass and orbital distance from their respective stars as Earth. Maybe our solar system really is unusual. There sure do seem to be a lot of weird hot Neptunes and giant fast rocky planets and other strange & unanticipated worlds. What’s going on, planetary physicists? Could you start explaining some of this stuff?
However Kepler’s mission to find Earthlike planets was not a wash. There are indeed other planet in the habitable zone. Some of them could have liquid water and clement atmospheres.
The real excitement of this data is that astronomers will already know where to point the next generation of exponentially more powerful telescopes as they come online in the next decade. I can hardly wait for astronomers to point the Webb Space Telescope and the Large Magellan Space Telescope at some of these newly discovered worlds!
ferrebeekeeper 
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May 18, 2016 at 2:42 PM
Mike
How do we know that NASA isn’t faking this like they did with the lunar landings?
May 19, 2016 at 11:33 PM
Wayne
If you stare at hundreds of thousands of stars for long enough you will notice that every few years some of them become dimmer. For example, when exceedingly large exoplanets transit in front of smaller stars, these stars can can dim by nearly 1% (although of course this is an extreme example and most of the transitional light shift will be a great deal less noticeable).
May 20, 2016 at 4:17 PM
Neomys Sapiens
While I’m totally behind the continuation and expansion of space activities, I cannot help but to question the exoplanet craze. Rather than stare at worlds that remain out of humanity’s reach for a very long time, any resources available should be directed at making access to space safe, affordable and regular, rather than a exotic venture where people have to undergo a lenghty and gruelling training to be literally launched into orbit.
What we really need is a new reusable system, preferably of the SSTO type. That should have priority over any mars mission as well. When a fleet of such vehicles exists and access to LEO and then GEO becomes a regular thing, the step to making the inner solar system navigable will be exactly that – a logical step, not a daring, adventurous jump. It should be a matter of planned progress, not of national pride. The time for humans going to Mars, for example, will be right, when you can get them back no matter what happens. And then get them there again and so on..until then, the robotic probes and rovers do a good job. Right now, we have a single manned station in orbit, the supply and support of which is no matter of course after all that time. Talking of Kepler, gone is our capability to service and upgrade systems in orbit. But we are building giant rockets again and plan to send manned missions to another planet. This defers good practice and common sense.
June 2, 2016 at 5:27 PM
Wayne
I am a fan of spaceplanes too, but truly versatile and safe ones still seem a long way off (especially since NASA and the ESA are now focused elsewhere). Maybe if we had some robot manufacturers start building some compounds elsewhere so we would have a place to go: like a manufacturing compound on the moon or my floating city on Venus.