Tracy Drain

So it's possible they also come from other things.

I'm going to make something up right now.

I'm making this up.

If the star goes supernova, I don't know what happens to the planets on the end or if the star turns into a white dwarf.

Maybe there are other ways for a rogue planet to form, but that's the way that I know.

And you're right.

Since they're not near a star and going around it in a repeatable fashion for Kepler to measure that dip in brightness, Kepler cannot find rogue planets like that.

Yeah, that's actually not a bad analogy.

So we definitely, being able to fold up the solar arrays is an integral part of the original design.

If you imagine, stick your arms out to the side, if you had about three elbows, then you could fold your arms in very nicely.

That's how it happens.

And we had long conversations about when you fold it up and you have the cells that are on the outside, should those be the cells that are power producing or should you fold it so that the power producing ones are on the inside in case something happens to hit them?

Do you protect them or do you need to make power?

There's a whole bunch of trades that are like that.

Ours, we did power side out so that if somehow it took longer for the arrays to deploy than we thought, you had some power while you're trying to figure out what's going on.

And this is one of the pieces where the spacecraft needs to be autonomously set to do all the things.

We have very large batteries on the spacecraft.

Unlike some missions where you could launch and you'd only have like a couple of hours before you had to get the arrays out or you would run out of power,

We had many hours.

I think something like 19 hours because we're here at the Earth and cells are out.