[ExI] kepler study says 8.8e9 earthlike planets

[John Clark]

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 2:32 AM, Tomaz Kristan <protokol2020 at gmail.com>wrote:

> There is no excuse of not having a spectrometer on Kepler.
>

I can think of a pretty good excuse, the telescope on Kepler was nowhere
near big enough even to produce a single pixel  image of a earth-like
planet, let alone produce enough light to feed into a spectroscope. All
Kepler could do is record the small dinning of the host star when a planet
occluded it. If NASA had 10 or 20 extra billion to spend on a much much
larger telescope then a spectroscope might have been appropriate.

   John K Clark
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