KOPN Tech Radio

Rob Beckstrom, director of the NCSC resigned on Friday. His resignation will become effective March 13th. Beckstrom put in his resignation because the NCSC did not receive enough funding from the DHS (Department of Homeland Security) and he was “unwilling to subjugate” his office to the NSA.

He has recommended that the Deputy Director Mary Ellen Seale be his successor.

Rob was Chairman and Chief Catalyst of TWIKI.NET, which supports the open source wiki Twiki. He also founded C*ATS Software Inc., and is the author of The Starfish and The Spider.

On Saturday at 9:49pm,  Keplar successfully launched into space.

It’s a new telescope with an intriguing mission: find earth-sized planets in earth-distant orbits around other stars.

We have been finding lots of other planets around stars for a while now (hundreds), but none can even hope to be earth-like. Most are too big. Jupiter big. That is because the technique used to find them: measuring the gravitational wobble of the star, is too small to see with the current telescopes unless the planets are huge.

This satellite will enter solar (not earth) orbit. It will be scanning for photonic variations from a particular swath of stars. It has a 95 megapixel camera. Distant from earth, it will have less RF/light noise to deal with.

Ideally, it will return size, mass, orbital distance, and even, hopefully, surface temperature.

We might find that second Earth.

NASA’s link: Kepler