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. Sometimes at the beginning of Campaign 16. That's when we did the wave at Earth image that you all 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 Vlog 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 that 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. I had already started in earnest working on a PhD thesis based on the old data, archival data that was more than 10 years old at that time. Then the Kepler data started to arrive and I wasn't directly involved and people in my group meeting and my research group, older students and postdocs started working on this data and started showing me the data. 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. My own curiosity had led me to work on that instead of what I was doing previously. I just redefined my thesis in my fifth year. I rewrote my thesis proposal and wrote an entirely different thesis. The 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 and was excited about it. 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 be the second person to do something that you cared about that was truly awesome than 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. 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 has meant to me and my career. How much I have appreciated the amazing engineers from Ball Arrow Space and the support from NASA, the Kepler-GO 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 at 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. you