RIP

I come to praise Kepler, not to bury it... Kepler! The Kepler Mission is one of the little NASA spacecraft that so frequently comes along, exceeds all expectations and changes our perspective of the universe. There is a good Quick History of the transit method and Kepler Mission concept on the website. Otto Struve noted in his seminal 1952 note that planetary "eclipses" of their parent stars ought to be detectable by photoelectric methods, a proposal that some two decades later was quantified by Rosenblatt, and then explored in detail (including development research) by Borucki and…