No one else has brought up that another Kepler wouldn't necessarily be as impactful as the original. True, it would probably discover another couple thousand p

No one else has brought up that another Kepler wouldn't necessarily be as impactful as the original. True, it would probably discover another couple thousand planets, but Kepler has already done that once. What's another factor of two in the number of known planets? Kepler looks off the plane of the Galaxy at stars that are typically several kiloparsecs away. In other words, we are never going to visit these worlds. Now that Kepler has revealed that planets are common, it will be much more interesting to find nearby planets that we have a better chance of characterizing, seding probes to, or even visiting one day. This is what TESS will do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transiting_Exoplanet_Survey_Satellite http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transiting_Exoplanet_Survey_Sat...