 Huh hey there astro vlog fans just a quick note today. It's Friday July 6th end of the week So I'm working from home today And we got an email this morning saying that the Kepler spacecraft was put into a sleep mode or they call it actually a nap mode The original sleep mode the spacecraft had used a lot of fuel to keep it pointed in like a safe direction and the nap mode is a No fuel or a very low fuel version of safe mode for a long time Now we've known the spacecraft is running out of gas when I went to the Kepler science conference at NASA Ames in the bay area last year Somebody said that the Kepler spacecraft had less than two pints so like less than two of these fuel left Well now we've gotten down to fumes like basically nothing pessimistically. I thought we would run out of gas Sometime at the beginning of campaign 16. That's when we did the wave at earth image that you'll remember that is earth That's you Come on. How cool is that? I'll put the link in the description below But go check out that episode of the astro blog we talk about the selfie that Kepler took of earth Not only did Kepler or K2 as they're calling it now make it through campaign 16 But it also made it through campaign 17 and now it's 50 days 51 days into campaign 18 That's way more than I expected Kepler has been operating now for over nine years So they've still got 51 days of science data on board that they think they can successfully get down And that's going to be an awesome data set to still go through there is some hope the spacecraft might be able to be Used for a little bit longer. They're still accepting targets The community is a little bit hesitant at this point but the big reason the Kepler mission isn't over is that we've just begun to really understand these data just today I'm working through edits on a paper using data from the original Kepler mission I've got another paper that I'm working on with more data from the original Kepler mission My colleagues and I are working on projects just getting started to understand the K2 data as well Honestly, I haven't even caught up with the things that Kepler has done in the last year and a half That's all to say the science potential of Kepler has not even hit its midpoint in my fourth year of graduate school So two-thirds the way through but I had already started in earnest working on a PhD thesis Based on old data archival data that was more than ten years old at that time And then the Kepler data Started to arrive and I wasn't directly involved and people in my group meeting in my research group Older students and postdocs started working on this data and started showing me the data And I got so excited about it that I started writing code to analyze it and started making contributions Midway through my fourth year I found that I was working full-time on the Kepler data That my own curiosity had led me to work on on that instead of what I was doing previously and so I just Redefined my thesis in my fifth year. I rewrote my thesis proposal And I wrote an entirely different thesis that this data was fresh and new and exciting and it was a true opportunity To do something new but at the same time it was a risk. It was a risk because I might delay my graduation It was a risk because I was working on things that were hot in the community was excited about and so somebody else might do it first In fact some of the things I wanted to do other people did it first Kepler was the mission that made me realize that it was better to To be the second person to do something that you cared about that was truly awesome Then be the first person to do something that nobody cared about at all the Kepler mission represented the time when I decided to make a Change and take control of my own direction scientifically and That has paid off in every possible way. So yeah, we're not saying goodbye to Kepler today, but Probably soon I just wanted to put another note on YouTube here to just say how much this mission is meant to me and my career How much I have appreciated the amazing engineers from ball aerospace and the support from NASA the Kepler Geo office. I'm not officially part of the Kepler mission. I've never been part of the Kepler mission I've had proposals successfully accepted and done by the Kepler mission, but I'm not part. I'm not affiliated I'm not sponsored. I'm not funded by Kepler in any way It's just been a mission that my tax dollars have funded and has changed my life The Kepler mission's goal was to determine how frequent how common planets like Earth around stars like our Sun are and it's done that it's put the first real constraints on that important number But in doing so we've learned as much or more about the stars themselves And that's what I've worked on. So it's not goodbye just yet Kepler, but that day is coming And so we're getting ready for it. So today. I just wanted to say thank you