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NASA Ames Conducts Tests of Kepler Mission Image Detectors

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posted on Feb, 20 2008 @ 12:31 AM
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MOFFETT FIELD, Calif. - Sensitive detectors that may help find habitable planets orbiting distant stars as part of NASA's Kepler Mission are undergoing tests at Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.

Scheduled to launch in February 2009, the Kepler Mission will measure tiny variations in the brightness of stars to find planets that pass in front of them during their orbits. During these passes or "transits" the planets will slightly decrease the star's brightness. The detectors are similar to the image detectors found in a digital camera, but much more sensitive.

"This is a major milestone for the Kepler mission," said David Koch, deputy principal investigator for the Kepler Mission. "We will use hardware identical to what we will be flying on Kepler in the test bed at Ames. We will have the ability to create transits of a star so that we can see the change in the star's brightness. By simulating transits, we will be able to demonstrate that the flight hardware will work," Koch explained.

"We expect to find dozens of planets in the habitable zone of solar-like stars that are terrestrial size, rocky planets, similar to Earth," said William Borucki, Kepler's science principal investigator. "We will learn whether Earths are common or rare in our galaxy."

In space, the array of detectors will be covered with sapphire field-flattener lenses and use a telescope, which Borucki said will search a region of sky 30,000 times larger that the Hubble Space Telescope is able to observe.

Read complete article here

What if we find hundreds of earth like rocky planets with atmosphere and right distance from their stars? how exciting it will be? I am sure next thing we will be doing is, sending some robots to those planets to find whats going on :-)



posted on Feb, 20 2008 @ 11:41 AM
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Enceladus indeed kepler is the best exoplanet mission to date shame its running 2 years late due to nasa budget constraints.

very exciting but remember for evry star kepler looks at it only has a 2% chance of seeing any planets. Nasa expects to find around 50 planets in the HZ if they're the size of earth. In theory we can multiply that number by 50 to give us a more realistic number. So nasas guess right now is around 2500 earth size planets in the hz of 120,000 stars.

sending probes is a long way off keplers planets will be mostly 500+ light years away. The next thing we will do is use telescopes like darwin/tpf to collect data on planets atmospheres. Of course the holy grail of exoplanet science is to find another earth type atmosphere. Cant wait


tons of info on kepler here kepler.nasa.gov...

[edit on 20-2-2008 by yeti101]



posted on Feb, 20 2008 @ 11:01 PM
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reply to post by yeti101
 


Yes, can't wait to get the results of Kepler mission; thanks for that link; i will go through it

Ency



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