Kepler has some calibration requirements before it is ready to find Earth sized planets. It may be a year or more before the issue is resolved. However this does not mean it won’t be functioning or finding planets. Just not an earth twin…yet. William Borucki, Kepler principal investigator, reported the following on Ian O’Neill’s SpaceDisco site in response to the recent Nature article.

“There is a mistake in the Nature article. The Kepler Mission is actually doing very well and is producing planet discoveries that will be announced early next year. Data from 3 of the 84 channels that have more noise than the others will be corrected or the data flagged to avoid being mixed in with the low noise data prior to the time an Earth twin could be discovered.”

We just have to be patient! The software fix is on the way….now where have I heard that before???