Artist's impression of Kepler's 3000 light-year target area: Artwork: Jon Lomberg
Posted on 03/05/2009 10:22:36 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Artist's impression of Kepler's 3000 light-year target area: Artwork: Jon Lomberg
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
fyi
They shot down that CO2 satellite last week...
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
NASA's Kepler Mission Primed to Hunt Earth-like Worlds
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By Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer
posted: 19 February 2009
02:44 pm ET
NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope is set for a planned March 5 launch to begin searching for alien worlds the size of Earth and bigger, mission leaders said Thursday.
"We're only two weeks from launch and there's a lot of activities going on down at the Kennedy Space Center right now," said Jon Morse, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C.
The probe, which is slated to blast off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida aboard a Delta 2 booster, will be searching for Earth-sized planets orbiting other stars in the region where liquid water - essential to life as we know it - might exist. The spacecraft is expected to move to its launch pad today, mission managers said.
Over the last two decades, scientists have spotted more than 300 extrasolar planets circling other stars in our Milky Way galaxy. Most of these planets have been about the size of Jupiter or larger, making it unlikely they would harbor life.
"Most of these planets do not have Earth-like sizes or orbits," Morse said.
Over the course of its planned 3 1/2-year mission, Kepler will search the skies for planets 30 to 600 times smaller than Jupiter - closer to an Earthly girth. After launch, Kepler will enter a 372.5-day orbit around the sun, trailing in Earth's wake. It is expected to be the first to find truly Earth-sized planets orbiting stars like our own sun.
"I call it our planetary census-taker," Morse said.
Astrophysicist Alan Boss, of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., recently estimated that there are about ten thousand billion billion habitable planets in the observable universe, with some of those being Earth-like worlds.
Kepler will also be looking for Earth-like planets, rocky bodies that orbit what is called a star's "habitable zone," the region where liquid water, and perhaps life, could exist.
"Kepler's designed to find hundreds of Earth-like planets if they're common around stars," said Kepler principal investigator William Borucki of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif.
While Kepler will be looking for planets that could support life, it won't actually find any little green men.
"Kepler is not hoping to find E.T., it's hoping to find E.T.'s home," Borucki said.
Kepler won't yield any spectacular Hubble-esque images, but its 0.95-meter diameter telescope and array of 42 charge-coupled devices (light-sensitive microchips also found in standard digital cameras) will search for planets by measuring the change in brightness that occurs when a planets moves in front of its star (from the perspective of Earth).
By measuring the amount of fluctuation in light and how long it lasts, scientists can estimate the size of the planet, the size of its orbit and potentially even the planet's temperature.
This same transit technique is responsible for finding most of the known exoplanets to date.
Do you think the discovery of alien life will help Republicans or Democrats? I think it would help the Dems in terms of— everybody will get all hippy and start talking about the world and all that gay stuff.
NRA donations probably would go up though.
The romulans aren’t squat compared to an Arquillian battle cruiser.
There are more reasons to believe in God, but by all means keep looking.
I think that we long for cosmic cousins, so long as they’re not going to either use us as food, or kill us and steal our resources. IOW, we want to meet little green men that aren’t much like us.
Oh, and Orion slave girls: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orions
Seriously, I like the idea of watching, and of NOT broadcasting. I’m not so keen on the idea of a vastly technologically superior species with little in the way of common morality with us, learning of our existence. Let us find evidence of them first, unify somewhat because of that, and begin to really race forward technologically - because we might someday need to defend ourselves.
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
What Finding Alien Life Could Mean for EarthSpace.com ^ | 02/19/09
Posted on Thu 19 Feb 2009 02:01:17 PM PST by presidio9
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Centauri Dreams ^ | 2/20/09
Posted on Fri 20 Feb 2009 09:50:32 AM PST by LibWhacker
Yeh, sure you were you Romulan plant.
You're just trying to make your race seem stronger than they actually are, aren't you? ;^)
We have to get the US Code modified so that we can all have phased plasma rifles in the 40 megawatt range.
Lamh Foistenach Abu!
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Image (click to enlarge): Kepler’s target region, the Milky Way ni the Cygnus region, with the instrument’s field of view superimposed. Each rectangle indicates the specific region of the sky covered by each CCD element of the Kepler photometer. There are a total of 42 CCD elements in pairs, each pair comprising a square. Credit: NASA/Carter Roberts (1946-2008).
Thanks for the post that covers another subject other than Washington DC.
The entire world is gay now? :)
I think you are right about the gun buying, though I see little advantage in having a Glock vs. giant space lasers (technical term).
I think I would be more interested in seeing how the religious community deals with an entirely new race of intelligent beings, or how our philosophers reconcile the idea that humans are just one voice of many in a vast universe teeming with thought. The very idea is simply mind-boggling.
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