Kepler mission: let the planet hunt begin!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I can’t wait to see what comes out of this mission! In just the next few years it may tell us the frequency of earth-like planets!!

http://www.kepler.nasa.gov/
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News Releases update

2009 May 13. KEPLER MISSION STATUS REPORT - 2009-084 - Let the Planet Hunt Begin. Excerpt: NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has begun its search for other Earth-like worlds. The mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on March 6, will spend the next three-and-a-half years staring at more than 100,000 stars for telltale signs of planets. Kepler has the unique ability to find planets as small as Earth that orbit sun-like stars at distances where temperatures are right for possible lakes and oceans. “Now the fun begins,” said William Borucki, Kepler science principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif. “We are all really excited to start sorting through the data and discovering the planets.” Scientists and engineers have spent the last two months checking out and calibrating the Kepler spacecraft. Data have been collected to characterize the imaging performance as well as the noise level in the measurement electronics. The scientists have constructed the list of targets for the start of the planet search, and this information has been loaded onto the spacecraft…
The mission’s first finds are expected to be large, gas planets situated close to their stars. Such discoveries could be announced as early as next year. See Full Report.

2009 April 16 NEWS RELEASE: 2009-067 - NASA’S KEPLER CAPTURES FIRST VIEWS OF PLANET-HUNTING TERRITORY
PASADENA, Calif. – EXCERPT: NASA’s Kepler mission has taken its first images of the star-rich sky where it will soon begin hunting for planets like Earth.
The new “first light” images show the mission’s target patch of sky, a vast starry field in the Cygnus-Lyra region of our Milky Way galaxy. One image shows millions of stars in Kepler’s full field of view, while two others zoom in on portions of the larger region. The images can be seen online at: [project website; NASA portal; JPL Photojournal]
“Kepler’s first glimpse of the sky is awe-inspiring,” said Lia LaPiana, Kepler’s program executive at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “To be able to see millions of stars in a single snapshot is simply breathtaking.”
One new image from Kepler shows its entire field of view – a 100-square-degree portion of the sky, equivalent to two side-by-side dips of the Big Dipper. The region contains an estimated 4.5 million stars, more than 100,000 of which were selected as ideal candidates for planet hunting.
Two other views focus on just one-thousandth of the full field of view. In one image, a cluster of stars located about 13,000 light-years from Earth, called NGC 6791, can be seen in the lower left corner. The other image zooms in on a region containing a star, called Tres-2, with a known Jupiter-like planet orbiting every 2.5 days.
“It’s thrilling to see this treasure trove of stars,” said William Borucki, science principal investigator for Kepler at NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif. “We expect to find hundreds of planets circling those stars, and for the first time, we can look for Earth-size planets in the habitable zones around other stars like the sun.”
…We’ve spent years designing this mission, so actually being able to see through its eyes is tremendously exciting," said Eric Bachtell, the lead Kepler systems engineer at Ball Aerospace & Technology Corp. in Boulder, Colo. Bachtell has been working on the design, development and testing of Kepler for nine years.

2

I’m very excited about this project. We actually should start finding planets very soon - the ones very close to the star that orbit it in a matter of days or weeks.

For those who don’t know, this mission is looking at about 100,000 stars, which it keeps in view at all times. With continuous imaging, they’ll be able to spot variations in the light reaching earth from each star, potentially indicating a planet crossing between us and the star.

To determine that a planet is really a planet and not just some other transient blip, you need to measure the crossing three times to verify that it’s got a constant orbital period. That’s why an earth-type planet will take about three years to discover, even though the mission is fully operational and measuring now. Those planets much closer to the star could be discovered much sooner, but will not be in a habitable orbit. But at least we’ll be able to prove out the techniques and validate that we are in fact finding planets.

Not all the stars viewed will show planets, because the only ones the technique works on are those that have their orbital planes tilted such that they’ll fly between us and the parent star. Some of those stars will have their orbital planes tilted such that we never see planets crossing the disc.

But within a few years now, we’re going to have an extremely good notion of how many earth-type planets there are in the galaxy. At least in terms of their mass and distance from the star.

Another cool aspect of this technique is that when the planet crosses the disc, some of the star’s light goes through the atmosphere of the planet and gets filtered. So by looking at the spectra of the star during the transit and comparing it to the spectra before or after, we might actually be able to determine the atmospheric composition of those planets. Now that’s very cool. The Enterprise didn’t have sensors that could read the composition of a planet’s atmosphere from hundreds of light years away. But we do.

3

That is cool. Be nice to locate the Borg and get a jump start on figuring out how to kill them before they get here…:smiley:

4

I don’t get it . . . It would take centuries for this Kepler probe actually to get near any star but Sol. Presumably it is simply taking pictures from the Solar System. So . . . what can it do that the Hubble telescope can’t do?

5

It can look at the same stars, without moving off them, for years on end. That’s the only real way to detect planets using this technique.

That’s what’s unique about Kepler - they aimed it at a patch of 100,000 stars, and it will stare at them, unblinking, for years. The stream of data will be analyzed by computers to look for transient events.

Hubble is constantly shifting from star to star. The odds of it catching a planetary transition is extremely small, since this transition happens only once per planet orbit.

Kepler isn’t a ‘probe’. It’s not going anywhere. It’s parked in one of the Lagrange points near the earth, and it will spend its life there.

Kepler’s optics and electronics are optimized for this specific mission. It has already measured the surface temperature of a known ‘hot Jupiter’ planet previously discovered. It’s said to be so accurate that it will be able to measure the wobble of the planets as they traverse the star, which means it can even detect moons of planets 1,000 light years away. Amazing.

The reason this is important is twofold - one, discovery of a wide range of planetary systems will give us a better understanding of planet formation in general. Differences in the composition and arrangement of planets between stars of different types is going to tell us a lot of stuff. Second, by learning how many planets exist in the habitable zones of stars, we’ll have a much better idea of how many potential ‘earths’ there are. That’s one more variable of the Drake equation fiilled in.

That alone will teach us a lot. For example, why haven’t we found other civilizations? A perfectly acceptable answer today is, “Well, maybe it’s extremely rare for Earthlike planets to even exist”. But if Earth-like planets are common, then we can start exploring other reasons why intelligent life may be rare.

Finally, Kepler will be cataloging hopefully hundreds of earth-like planets. We’ll know how massive they are, what their orbits are, and the future dates of all transitions. This data will give future telescopes targets to look at, and maybe even tell us what kind of telescopes to build in the future.

It’s science. You collect data, you fit it into the big puzzle, you learn from it, and eventually it all helps to pull together our understanding of the universe.

6

Sadly if it detects Earth like planets they are forever beyond our reach.:frowning:

7

Based on the one example we have to go on, one answer would be that it takes a very, very, very long time, possibly encompassing several eras and periods and epochs and extinction-level events, for a planetary biosphere to produce an intelligent species.

8

Oh, don’t be such a defeatist! Nothing is beyond the reach of human ingenuity when there are slaves to be conquered! :slight_smile:

9

Possibly, of course. There are many possible reasons why we haven’t yet met ET. Kepler is just addressing a few of them.

10

Me too! I’ve been following Kepler since its launch.

Basically, it’s only looking at approx. 20,000 stars/planets in our galaxy, looking for a flicker, or change of light showing it orbits then focusing in and determining if it has water and is inhabitable.

Truly amazing. :slight_smile:

11

Given the human ongoing human induced extinction event one could also make the argument that intelligent life is self destructive.

12

Typical NASA efficiency. The fucking thing’s already lost 80,000 stars. At this rate, by next Friday it’ll be looking at one stop light in Hoboken, NJ.

:wink:

13

Or if they have oil.

14

This is not really debate material (yet).

I’m sending it to a new home.

15

My husband is working on it, but I don’t get it either. They have good barbeques though - but a terrible softball team (the Space Cadets.)

16

Or, to turn this on its head, maybe we’re actually late to the game, and all of the truly intelligent species have grown up and gotten together for a really empyrean game of Pan-Universal Canasta. We may just happen to be a “special needs” species who are still impressed with digital phones and laser pointers.

Please demonstrate evidence of this “ongoing human induced extinction event.”

Stranger

17

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6502368/

The point being humans have a major habit of crapping where they eat.

18

What a crappy name for an organisation.

19

While I don’t want to downplay the significance of humanity’s negative ecological impact, I’ve recently been thinking about whether or not the gloss that we’re now living through the worst extinction event ever is all that justified. For one thing, we’ve been here a little too short to enable meaningful statistical comparisons with events happening on geological timescales – take, for instance, a hypothetical situation where, in the long-term average, one species goes extinct per year. Saying that the extinction rate now is higher than ever before strikes me to (possibly) be a bit like picking out that day of some year on which a species actually went extinct, and saying that on this day, the extinction rate was 365 times higher than normally, and that this day therefore marked the worst extinction event ever.

Also, if we were to stop having an influence on extinction rates right about now (however that might be possible), how big would our effect on the fossil record actually be? Would there really be much more than a dent? I mean, serious extinction events typically mean that 50% of all species went extinct; currently, if the numbers in the article you quoted are accurate, with 1.6 million known species (and likely many, many more unknown ones), less than one percent even are endangered.

However, I do recognise that if we keep on doing what we’re doing, eventually things are going to turn out pretty bad, and we might end up causing a major extinction event; I just question whether or not it’s wise to extrapolate from our relatively short timescales to geological ones just to somewhat shakily make a point that can be made much easier, by pointing out more immediate consequences of our ecological recklessness.

20

This is radio spectrometry, right? I have always thought that is one of the coolest inventions ever! To have thought of it in the first place, and then be able to actually execute it, really impresses me.