Editing 638: The Search
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The title text refers to the {{w|Kepler mission}} to discover {{w|Extrasolar planets}}. In August 2009, a couple of weeks before this comic, the first results of this mission were released, which showed the spacecraft to be healthy and had detected a known exoplanet. No new science results would be released until November of 2009, which Randall was anticipating. This mission has found more than 2,700 planet candidates that still have to be confirmed by other telescopes. So that's the difference to the ants. As of August 2013, two "reaction wheels" (heavy metallic discs that can be spun to impart angular momentum to the probe, mounted on the major axis; an alternative to reaction thrusters, which require a depletable supply of reaction fuel) on Kepler have failed, causing NASA to change the mission, though it will still be looking for planets with its two remaining wheels. | The title text refers to the {{w|Kepler mission}} to discover {{w|Extrasolar planets}}. In August 2009, a couple of weeks before this comic, the first results of this mission were released, which showed the spacecraft to be healthy and had detected a known exoplanet. No new science results would be released until November of 2009, which Randall was anticipating. This mission has found more than 2,700 planet candidates that still have to be confirmed by other telescopes. So that's the difference to the ants. As of August 2013, two "reaction wheels" (heavy metallic discs that can be spun to impart angular momentum to the probe, mounted on the major axis; an alternative to reaction thrusters, which require a depletable supply of reaction fuel) on Kepler have failed, causing NASA to change the mission, though it will still be looking for planets with its two remaining wheels. | ||
β | The second part is a bait-and-switch joke; by calling the search for extrasolar planets "the second most important thing our species has ever done", it creates the expectation that the "first most important thing" will be a monumental breakthrough, | + | The second part is a bait-and-switch joke; by calling the search for extrasolar planets "the second most important thing our species has ever done", it creates the expectation that the "first most important thing" will be a monumental breakthrough, like the concept of language, or the concept of pi. Instead, the title text ends up just telling us that [[Randall]] likes a Pizza Service. |
==Transcript== | ==Transcript== |