Kepler Telescope Barely in Contact with Ground Controllers

The Kepler Science Team will be hosting the First Kepler Science Conference ever between December 5-9, at the NASA Ames Research Center (ARC), in Moffett Field, California. The group will announce discoveries that were not included in the messages released since the last major update.

At this point, the telescope is producing data at a very fast pace, but it cannot rely everything back to Earth due to limited bandwidth. At this point, the spacecraft transmits data back to Earth at a rate of about 250 bits-per-second (bps).

This largely happens because it is currently located about 51 million kilometers (31.6 million miles) away from our planet. Data transfer rates are expected to increase back to 2,000 bps over the next six months, but will then start to drop again as the telescope moves even farther away from Earth.

At that time, the Kepler Science Team will need to use the NASA Deep Space Network's (DSN) 70-meter antenna, in Goldstone, California, just to support a 250 bps transfer rate.